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Opinion: How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world | The Observer
(www.theguardian.com)
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And that’s basically it!
We had the most severe rate of COVID deaths in the world outside of Eastern Europe. That shouldn't happen in the most powerful country in the world. We failed to do the things we needed to early on and created a culture of misinformation because our president decided to play politics in a crisis.
Had we reacted as well as New Zealand, largely considered to have one of the better responses, we theoretically could have had 280k deaths instead of 1.2 million. (If we matched their death rate) Obviously population density and our countries complex system account for some of the difference in death rate, but it doesn't account for the enormous gulf between us and other wealthy countries. We are the only wealthy country in the world that had a death rate as high as ours. He bungled the response and likely got an extra half a million people killed. It's amazing that this fact alone didn't end his political career, but Americans suck at interpreting data.
Sure, but the person I was replying to claimed that “Trump’s incompetence caused a million people to die,” and I was questioning whether all of that can really be blamed on him. Because I don’t think so. He was pro-vaccine from the beginning, and there were plenty of Democrat politicians saying they wouldn’t take “the Trump vaccine.”
And no, I don’t think the situation was handled optimally in the U.S. - but that was the case almost everywhere. Obviously, Trump isn’t without fault here, but placing all the blame on him feels disingenuous
That sounds wild. Could you provide an example?
Well apparently they didn't exactly say they'd refuse to take it but voiced their scepticism about it nevertheless.
Source
Hmm. I will say I think the skepticism of the vaccine that came out too quick was bipartisan, though, if not more among Republicans.
I don't think there's inherently anything wrong about scepticism towards new things like that. It's when the disnformation and conspiracies comes in that it turns kinda sinister.
Probably true that it's more common on the right - in the U.S. atleast.