Anti-Science Nonsense May Block Coronavirus Cure
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States…. [It is] nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” -- Isaac Asimov
The coronavirus emerged in an era when truth is all-too-often defined by the ideological leanings of the beholder.
Governors Newsom and Cuomo appear before the public daily to discuss facts and dispense the advice they are receiving from medical experts.
President Trump, on the other hand, has blended misinformation and failed to refute conspiracy theories about the origins and spread of the coronavirus. Sadly, he gets a bigger TV audience.
His desperate attempts to reshape the facts to fit his political needs has introduced a level of uncertainty that threatens efforts to limit the effects of the virus and will undermine the effectiveness of any future vaccine.
At a March 19 news conference the President touted hydroxychloroquine to treat those who test positive for COVID-19. He claimed the Food and Drug Administration had approved it for COVID-19 treatment, a claim the FDA denied.
Trump learned about the drug via a lawyer falsely claiming an affiliation with Stanford University appearing on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight touting the results of a deeply flawed French study: a “100% cure rate against coronavirus”.
From the Guardian:
The idea that hydroxychloroquine is “the cure” has taken off within certain online communities, including among anti-vaxxers and followers of QAnon, a rightwing conspiracy theory. The drug has also found support from the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a small, ultra-conservative organization that advocates against government involvement in medicine. The group launched a texting campaign to bombard physicians with demands to sign a petition against “red tape” that might prevent them from prescribing the drug, Reuters reported.
Dana Milbank’s analysis of this behavior provides a good starting point:
This country’s woeful response to the virus has an obvious cause: a president who refused to heed warnings and to prepare, instead offering false assurances while the nation snoozed. Even now, inexcusable delays limit tests, ventilators and respirators, and even now President Trump resists a nationwide stay-at-home order.
But it’s painful for some to put the responsibility where it belongs. Christian broadcaster Rick Wiles, therefore, took a different tack. He blamed the Jews. “God is spreading it in your synagogues! You’re under judgment because you oppose his son, the Lord Jesus Christ,” he proclaimed on his TruNews platform. This is the same Rick Wiles who in November called Trump’s impeachment a “Jew coup.” And this is the same Rick Wiles whose TruNews outlet was granted press credentials by the Trump administration to cover the World Economic Forum in January; Wiles stayed in a room booked by the administration.
Others follow Trump’s lead in blaming scientists for our woes. As The Post first reported, the government had to step up security for Anthony Fauci, the top infectious-disease expert at the National Institutes of Health and the most visible scientist responding to the crisis. Threats had been made against the 79-year-old doctor, who frequently contradicts Trump’s uninformed happy talk. Fauci has been attacked by pro-Trump outlets such as Gateway Pundit and American Thinker, which labeled Fauci a “Deep-State Hillary Clinton-loving Stooge.” The dark-web conspiracy theorists from QAnon and the like do worse to Fauci, a loyal public servant under every president since Ronald Reagan.
The fringe part of Trump’s (is that an oxymoron?) following is having a field day on Facebook. Whackjob theories include:
Saying Microsoft founder Bill Gates is using the virus as part of a project to “track” people with a future vaccine
Alex Jones of Infowars pushing a conspiracy theory about the virus being an American-made biological weapon. (So he can sell overpriced vitamin products)
The 5G wireless signals are harmful crowd have falsely linked the technology to Covid-19.
Social distancing is a police state tactic
Claiming the virus doesn’t exist
https://twitter.com/New_Narrative/status/1247539484364656641?s=20
From the New York Times:
The anti-vaccination movement is also capitalizing on the pandemic. The New York Times used the analytics tool CrowdTangle to survey 48 prominent anti-vax Instagram accounts and found that video views spiked from 200,000 in February to more than two million in March, just as the pandemic took off globally. Another Times analysis of anti-vax accounts showed a surge in followers during the last week of March. In private groups on Facebook, junk science and unproven treatment claims proliferate.
A significant number of people refusing a vaccine when and if it does become available, could compromise the whole effort.
As the coronavirus was moving through Asia early in 2020, Gallup found a drop in the percentage of U.S. parents who see vaccinations as “very important or important” from 94% in 2010 to 84% at present..
The survey found that older and more educated people valued vaccinations more. Men value them less than women and those who identify themselves as Democrats were more likely to value vaccinations than Republican respondents.
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The International Fact-Checking Network has cataloged more than 1,000 COVID-19 claims since January that spring up around the globe.
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It’s easy to attribute this sort of ignorance to a lack of education or a silo effect, and I’m sure there’s a grain of truth there.
But this anti-science attitude is useful for certain ideologues who’ve ingratiated themselves into the current administration. The so-called religious leaders who surrounded the President during the impeachment process have skin in this game.
Evangelical extremists, some of whom believe the constitution should be replaced by the Old Testament (others just think Christians taking over the government is enough) see scientists or empiricism as the enemy.
Other “prophets and apostles” of the evangelical set believe that Trump’s presidency is part of God’s plan for the End Times and the second coming of Jesus Christ.
They see the chaos and division coming from the Trump presidency as a prelude to civil wars as well as a holy war between the “seeker-friendly artificial church” and “the real, supernatural remnant church.”
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Whether based in religion, cult-worship, or simply a distaste for democracy, the coronavirus epidemic has given Trump’s allies an opportunity to gain an advantage in the one area most threatening to them in the long run: voting.
They’re using fears of infection to suppress the vote in a close contest. Five polling stations in a city with 50,000 voters are a sure fire-way to influence an election.
A decision along partisan lines by the Supreme Court on Monday gave the go-ahead for primary elections in Wisconsin today. The unsigned majority opinion said the court was continuing its long standing opposition to last-minute orders by federal judges upending election procedures.
The election is proceeding despite the advice of public health professionals who say the state’s leaders are putting residents at risk of contracting and spreading the coronavirus.
University of California law professor Rick Hasen says the sharp divide in the court bodes poorly for voting rights advocates in the face of an expected onslaught of lawsuits aimed at newly enacted vote-by-mail procedures.
It is a very bad sign for November that the Court could not come together and find some form of compromise here in the midst of a global pandemic unlike anything we have seen in our lifetimes,” Hasen wrote. “With election changes proliferating and a fight over expanded absentee balloting necessary to combat the COVID crisis, the amount of litigation is going to skyrocket. And it does not look like the courts are going to be able to do any better than the politicians in finding common ground on election principles.”
“This means that there is a lot of work to do now to try to avoid election meltdown… but the message from today is: don’t expect the courts to protect voting rights in 2020,” he added.
Republicans in the state went to court to overturn an order by the governor to postpone the election to June 9, despite an epidemic in progress that has radically limited the number of available polling places.
While it’s unlikely there will be any surprises in the Democratic presidential primary voting (Biden has a substantial lead in polls), the GOP’s reasoning for excluding voters was tied to preserving a state supreme court seat on the ballot and hoping for better results among the 3900 other local contests.
https://twitter.com/MaggieSeverns/status/1247558071225851905?s=20
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