With the COVID-19 virus becoming an endemic public health issue, the anti-vaxx movement is able to fulfill its own circular logic, as the potential calls from public health officials for yearly COVID-19 vaccine shots will continue going forward. This yearly call for a coronavirus shot will further add fuel to the flames of anti-vaxxers who believe this is the money-trail to big pharma that they should be obsessed with. Not the fact that medicines that treat diabetes and the like cost outrageous amounts of money. No, it's the vaccines.
Unfortunately, it's the faux conspiracies, muddled below the very obvious ones that we can all see, hear, and or read about, that lower the standards in some states. This degradation of the public discourse means the expectations for leadership is also lower.
In March 2020, when the United States government and its elected officials were at a point where they could have made a serious impact in the unfolding of the past year's events, the National Observer's Caroline Orr wrote about the conflict between misinformation and science.
Reducing the spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation by even a small amount can have a big impact. One recent study, which used computer models to simulate the relationship between misinformation and the spread of disease during outbreaks, found reducing the amount of false health information being circulated by just 10 per cent could mitigate the harmful influence of that information.
As we all subsequently experienced, the proceeding months included fake therapeutic claims from the twice-impeached former president of the United States, as well as a never-ending stream of bullshit peddled by all of the other scam artists in his orbit. Fighting a global pandemic is hard and the work doesn't end because vaccines become available. That's not how any of this works. That's not how science works, and that is not how scientists and virologists have said it works. Ever.
The Republican Party's policy-free corruption has found the perfect mark for its brand of scammery in the anti-vaxxer movement. Conspiracy theorists believe that their broad, dot-connected, fact-eliding rationalizations prove their intelligence, when all they do is protect fragile egos afraid to admit when they are wrong. Any conversation with a conspiracy theorist ends with them moving the goal posts after every question of their is answered. You can tell them why this one assertion they are making makes no sense, you can explain to them how this one fact they heard isn't real or true, you can point to all of the data and they will just ask another 'why' question. The problem in the end is that they aren't interested in knowing 'why' anything. Ask a conspiracy theorist why and they already kinda know why. The answer is "them." Who is "they"? "They" is "them," don't you know?
It's this form of narcissism that allows conservative officials who have failed the public at every conceivable moment to rewrite history and try to pretend that they are now the party of logic and science.
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