The farther right your government, the higher your Covid risk. And climate risk. And economic risk.
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They’re the ideology of collapse.
When Covid-19 arrived, it was possible that we would mask up, socially distance, contact trace, and otherwise take measures to stop it in its tracks and hopefully wipe it off the map. We didn’t do that. Instead we let a minority of science deniers and lack-of-virtue signallers decide for the rest of us that we were going to get the full throttle pandemic experience.
When public research developed effective vaccines, it was possible that we would enable the world’s population to confront the virus with immune systems armed with useful defensive antibodies, arresting the deadliness of the disease in its tracks to render it easier to handle. We didn’t do that either. Instead, our governments went to bat for big Pharma’s rights to deny the vaccine to most of the world and guarantee the proliferation of newer and more dangerous variants.
Now it’s here for good. You can expect Pfizer and Moderna to make billions every year with updated booster shot vaccines that try to stay ahead of emerging new variants, but this genie is never going to be backed into a bottle. The greedy and the ignorant decided for everyone else that we’d never have a world without this new pathogen ever again. For the greedy, this was the road to maximizing profits. For the angry and ill informed, endangering their own communities felt like a way to “own the libs” by calling it “freedom” to needlessly overwhelm their own health care systems. The political right did everything in its power to enable them along the way.
Now we’re all in the firing line. The World Health Organization and all of the people with actual PhDs in epidemiology told us that no one would be safe until we were all safe, so governments decided no one would be safe. An interesting, although completely unsurprising, thing happens when we compare the performance of different governments. We see very clearly that the more right leaning your government is, the greater the risk you personally face. The UK, Florida, Alberta. Point at a government that leans right and you’re also pointing at a higher Covid impact zone.
