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US Covid policies

jeudi 4 août 2022 à 09:34

The US has adopted policies that encourage the public to ignore Covid-19 and abandon the effective, low-tech methods of reducing transmission. This has allowed transmission to increase enormously, which puts vulnerable people at great danger. Politicians say, implicitly, that it doesn't matter if those people die, that they are not important enough to wear a mask for.

There are two side points in the article that I take issue with. First. eugenics means an active effort to control who can reproduce. Letting people get sick and perhaps die is not eugenics. It is wrong, but it is a different wrong. This is an example of a pattern of stretching terminology for condemning a wrong that has excited special ire, to apply it to other things and carry some of that ire to them.

Second, the article describes the US practices as "American exceptionalism", but I've seen similar practices in several European countries, and I think most of them have adopted the policy of "Imagine there's no Covid."

I asked the mayor of Boston to start a PR campaign to convince people to wear masks in enclosed places. Even if it's not a legal requirement, there are ways of convincing people to do it -- and in this case, it doesn't require any deception. Obviously, this has not been done.