{"id":16164,"date":"2025-03-10T01:00:55","date_gmt":"2025-03-10T08:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=16164"},"modified":"2025-11-15T23:09:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T07:09:11","slug":"issue-of-the-week-disease-population-human-rights-ecomomic-opportunity-personal-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=16164","title":{"rendered":"Issue of the Week: Disease, Population, Human Rights, Ecomomic Opportunity, Personal Growth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back to News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"image<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Five years of Covid<\/em>, The Atlantic, The New York Times, March 2025, Illustration by Ben Hickey<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Five years ago, the Covid pandemic hit in full force. It’s abated enough to seem slghtly more like history, even though it still is taking lives and is in a kind of limbo as to what happens next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What will happen next for sure is another pandemic, worse, that we are not prepared for, that we even bring on, by reckless and increasingly inhumane health policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two years ago, we posted the following<\/a>, as it appeared the pandemic may be winding down:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three years ago this month, the Covid pandemic hit with full force. Today, the first day of March, 2023, we begin year four.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re looking back. We\u2019re still in it. We\u2019re looking forward.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We don\u2019t know where we are.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We don\u2019t know what hit us.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How could we?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nothing like it has ever happened.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Worse plagues and calamities of various kinds?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But never in this age of all things connected in so many ways from personally to globally.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Never a consciuosly shared experience by all humanity at once quite like this.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the impact on us, from personal, to physical, to emotional, to cognitive, to ecomomic, to social, to political, to historical, to spiritual\u2013impossible still to fully disect for any of us.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The news is full of where did it start and how was it covered up. It has been before and will be again. Just as it has been and will be again on the millions infected and killed. And the myriad medical questions, answers and realities of the disease. And the inter-related dynamics in an inter-related world of the causes and effects of pandemics, which may be the end of us as likely as anything.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But now we all are, and hopefully in the future will be, survivors.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which starts with focussing, the seemingly most impossible thing to do.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nothing has done a better job of helping us to do so, which means to survive in any meaningful way, than the cover story in last Sunday\u2019s New York Times Magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first words are from 2020:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMarch is such a blur\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the first day of March, 2023, it still is.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the article:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Happened to Us<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

After you’ve finished, fast forward two years to this March, <\/p>\n\n\n\n

to now, <\/p>\n\n\n\n

with two remarkable articles from The Atlantic and The New York Times:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"image
Illustration by Ben Hickey<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

WHY THE COVID DENIERS WON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lessons from the pandemic and its aftermath By David Frum<\/a>, The Atlantic, March 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Five years ago, the coronavirus pandemic struck a bitterly divided society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Americans first diverged over how dangerous the disease was: just a flu (as President Donald Trump repeatedly insisted) or something much deadlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then they disputed public-health measures such as lockdowns and masking; a majority complied while a passionate minority fiercely resisted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, they split\u2014and have remained split\u2014over the value and safety of COVID\u201119 vaccines. Anti-vaccine beliefs started on the fringe, but they spread to the point where Ron DeSantis, the governor of the country\u2019s third-most-populous state, launched a campaign for president on an appeal to anti-vaccine ideology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Five years later, one side has seemingly triumphed. The winner is not the side that initially prevailed, the side of public safety. The winner is the side that minimized the disease, then rejected public-health measures<\/a> to prevent its spread, and finally refused the vaccines designed to protect against its worst effects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ahead of COVID\u2019s fifth anniversary, Trump, as president-elect, nominated the country\u2019s most outspoken vaccination opponent to head the Department of Health and Human Services. He chose a proponent of the debunked and discredited vaccines-cause-autism claim to lead the CDC. He named a strident critic of COVID\u2011vaccine mandates to lead the FDA. For surgeon general, he picked a believer in hydroxychloroquine, the disproven COVID\u201119 remedy. His pick for director of the National Institutes of Health had advocated for letting COVID spread unchecked to encourage herd immunity. Despite having fast-tracked the development of the vaccines as president, Trump has himself trafficked in many forms of COVID\u201119 denial, and has expressed his own suspicions that childhood vaccination against measles and mumps is a cause of autism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ascendancy of the anti-vaxxers may ultimately prove fleeting. But if the forces of science and health are to stage a comeback, it\u2019s important to understand why those forces have gone into eclipse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

from march 2020 to February 2022, about 1 million Americans died of COVID-19. Many of those deaths occurred after vaccines became available. If every adult in the United States had received two doses of a COVID vaccine by early 2022, rather than just the 64 percent of adults who had, nearly 320,000 lives would have been saved<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why did so many Americans resist vaccines? Perhaps the biggest reason was that the pandemic coincided with a presidential-election year, and Trump instantly recognized the crisis as a threat to his chances for reelection. He responded by denying the seriousness of the pandemic, promising that the disease would rapidly disappear on its own, and promoting quack cures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The COVID\u201119 vaccines were developed<\/a> while Trump was president. They could have been advertised as a Trump achievement. But by the time they became widely available, Trump was out of office. His supporters had already made up their minds to distrust the public-health authorities that promoted the vaccines. Now they had an additional incentive: Any benefit from vaccination would redound to Trump\u2019s successor, Joe Biden. Vaccine rejection became a badge of group loyalty, one that ultimately cost many lives.We want to believe that somebody is in control, even if it\u2019s somebody we don\u2019t like. At least that way, we can blame bad events on bad people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A summer 2023 study by Yale researchers of voters in Florida and Ohio found that during the early phase of the pandemic, self-identified Republicans died at only a slightly higher rate than self-identified Democrats in the same age range. But once vaccines were introduced, Republicans became much more likely to die than Democrats. In the spring of 2021, the excess-death rate among Florida and Ohio Republicans was 43 percent higher than among Florida and Ohio Democrats in the same age range. By the late winter of 2023, the 300-odd most pro-Trump counties in the country had a COVID\u201119 death rate more than two and a half times higher<\/a> than the 300 or so most anti-Trump counties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2016, Trump had boasted that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. In 2021 and 2022, his most fervent supporters risked death to prove their loyalty to Trump and his cause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

why did political fidelity express itself in such self-harming ways?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The onset of the pandemic was an unusually confusing and disorienting event. Some people who got COVID died. Others lived. Some suffered only mild symptoms. Others spent weeks on ventilators, or emerged with long COVID and never fully recovered. Some lost businesses built over a lifetime. Others refinanced their homes with 2 percent interest rates and banked the savings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n