By GUEST COLUMNIST George Volsky
Statistics daunt.
Early this month, more than 200 million cases of Covid-19 and 614,000 deaths, were recorded in 182 countries. These totals, believed to be considerably undercounted, unequivocally confirm that the pandemic that appeared to have stabilized at the beginning of the year, has surged anew. This is due mainly to the appearance of Delta, Covid’s latest, more infectious variant, which now affects the world’s 7.8 billion population. Delta is spreading because of renewed human mobility, premature return to “normalcy” in many nations and elsewhere to “vaccination reluctance.”
Some countries adopt drastic preventive measures. In Wuhan, the Chinese city where in late 2019 Covid had reportedly originated (of which later), 3 new Delta cases made authorities last month to order pandemic testing of its entire 12-million population. In early 2020, by imposing such strict controls throughout the country, China minimized the plague’s infections among its 1.4 billion people, and its negative impact on the country’s economy. Still, new Delta infections are now recorded in China and in Israel, a small country which earlier this year had claimed victory over Covid.
Unhappily, one of the pandemic-expanding countries is the United States. And Florida, mostly thanks to Governor Ron DeSantis’ inept, ignorant policies and his retrograde, anti-science health measures, heads the nation in negative statistics. Since late July, Florida’s almost daily increases established dubious records of new Covid infections and hospital admissions, the latest on August 7. Last week, the state’s children hospitals reported a worrisome record number of Delta juvenile patients.
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DeSantis, a faithful Trumpist Republican, has barred students from wearing mask at schools once classes begin. His actions and inactions have “merited” him being called worst governor in the state’s history. He and his equally science-ignoramus colleague Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, were publicly chastised by President Joe Biden.
(Like Trump, DeSantis disbelieves in climate change which, for others like him, is a communist or socialist plot to weaken this country. When in Miami, DeSantis is flanked by three toadying Republican members of Congress who reportedly share his views: Maria Elvira Salazar, Mario Diaz-Balart and Carlos Gimenez. “If you live in Miami and deny weather change you are really stupid,” commented about the trio a Republican Cuban-American who only gave his first name, Roland.
In the U.S., about 90 percent of the newly infected Delta patients are said to be women and men who have refused to be vaccinated and to wear masks. A large majority of these vaccine deniers are Republican Trump supporters. Polls indicate that most of them are ill-educated ultraconservatives and religious fundamentalists who reject science. They explain their disdain for the “jabs,” as Brits call vaccinations, claiming that being told to inoculate violates their “personal freedom.”
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Their anti “jab” views are reinforced by reactionary media which daily broadcast and print lies about the effectiveness of the scientist-developed drugs that prevent infection, or assuage its symptoms. The most prominent of these anti-science news platforms are Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and his publications in Australia and Great Britain. Virtually all consistently deny the statistically-proven fact that vaccination, mask wearing (with social distancing and hand washing) offer so far the only effective anti-plague protection.
Still, Sen. Ted Cruz said that any mask-wearing mandate was “authoritarian;” Sen. Rand Paul called jabs “vaccine fascism;” and Rep. Elise Stefanik, to reject being told to be vaccinated invoked “our individual freedom.” But these three Republicans, certified right-wing extremists, deny women the freedom for professional abortions.
In addition to disseminating lies about vaccination’s ineffectiveness, suggesting even their health danger, ultraconservative pseudo-scientists, politicians and media repeat a Covid conspiracy theory launched last year by President Trump. The conspiracy tale alleges the Covid-19 virus somehow “escaped” from Wuhan’s virology institute into the city, and that afterwards China’s communist rulers purposely disseminated the infection throughout the world.
So far, science-confirmed facts are the following: Covid-19 originated with pathogens, self-replicating viral organisms that exist dormant in all living species. But they become spontaneously viral when chemically mixed with viruses in other species. Pathogens in bats, whose large colonies exist near Wuhan, most probably merged with viruses in other animals or insects consumed by bats, to become the infectious Covid-19. Since bat meat is a delicacy in China – like pigeons or frogs elsewhere – it was sold, as many meats are today, frozen in Wuhan’s food market. Unknowingly, Wuhan bat eaters began passing Covid to other humans, and the pandemic took off. As of December 2019, with incredible speed, Covid-19 circled the globe. Because millions of misguided people still resist vaccination and masking, that contamination process has not been stopped in its world-wide track.
Last Thursday, speaking about the Republican “China blame” campaign, Bill Gates, whose billionaire foundation examines pandemics, said that origins of the nature-created diseases is an irrelevant propaganda that does nothing to stop it.
Gates, like most health experts, knows that pandemics have existed for millennia, since the dawn of civilization. In the middle of 14th century, half of Europe’s population died of the bubonic plague, brought there probably from India by rats in Italian trading ships. Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and other colonizers of the Americas infected and killed most of the continent’s population with smallpox and other diseases. Syphilis, prevalent among natives in America, arrived in Europe with gold and silver aboard the colonist-returning ships. Although cured today with antibiotics, it is still here, having in the past infected millions, and killed scores of European kings, princes and aristocrats of both sexes. Culprits: according to Church prelates, the victims themselves, God-castigated for their sins.
The 1918-1919 flu, which according to American researchers assuredly originated in a Kansas military camp, is called the “Spanish Flu.” It’s because newspapers of Spain, whose King Alfonso XIII, came down with it, and which was not a World War I belligerent, extensively covered the disease. Meantime, the U.S., Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and other waring nations had imposed a near total “flu blackout.”
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By 1920, when the world-wide flu ended, about 50 million people – some statistics say even close to 100 million – had died from it.
Today virologists in many countries, big and small, are feverishly trying to devise a near-absolute antidote to Covid-19 and its present and possible future variants. In the meantime, health experts and governments recommend, and in some cases order vaccinations. And mask wearing is definitely re-imposed in many cities. These are reasonable, science-advised measures with which, hopefully, the world will win the battle against the predatory nature and its latest pandemic.
George Volsky, a World War II Royal Air Force veteran, educated at the London School of Economics, was a decades-long, Miami based correspondent for The New York Times and a consultant for various American think tanks, such as the Rand Corporation and the Hoover Institution.
Top cause for COVID mask, ‘jab’ reluctance is right wing anti-science added by Ladra on
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