Anti-vax Republicans digging their own graves… and ours

The Covid-19 disaster in this country, which has been made worse by Republican policies and priorities, has been killing many more Republicans than Democrats.

The central cause that the United States has suffered the world’s worst death toll from Covid-19 is the hyper-capitalist nature of our system, itself a product of four decades of Republican ascendancy. Hyper-capitalism is not just about the country’s economic policies but the ultra-individualist attitudes that correspond to it. There has always been a strong individualistic streak in American culture but there were also expressions of solidarity such as unions, which have been decimated as the country, led by Republican power and ideology, drifted right.

Applying Ockham’s razor, which cuts out unnecessary hypotheses, the thread that connects all the factors usually described as causes of our disaster—Trump, the hollowing out of the public health system, the resistance to vaccines, masks, social distancing, and lockdowns—are all functions of the world view that corresponds to hyper-capitalism: laissez-faire.

A rough translation of laissez-faire from the French is “let them do [as they will]”. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines laissez-faire as “a philosophy or practice characterized by a usually deliberate abstention from direction or interference especially with individual freedom of choice and action.” This philosophy of limitless liberty has led to unlimited loss in American lives.

The result of laissez-faire Covid-19 policy has been pandemonium. The Merriam-Webster gives the following example of the use of the word:

“It is obvious that pandemonium would exist at most uncontrolled airports if every pilot did not conscientiously follow the traffic pattern.”

The problem in the United States runs deeper. No agreed-on traffic pattern was established for even a conscientious pilot to follow. The Republican party, especially Republican governors, have effectively opposed mandatory rules requiring vaccination, masks, crowd size limits, and the closing of businesses. Instead, as in the economy, laissez-faire has been the implicit rule.

The result has been that the United States leads the world on Covid-19 deaths per million people in the population. Among large, advanced nations the per capita of Covid deaths is as follows: United States 328, Japan 144, Germany 83, UK 67, and France 67.

The biggest irony in this picture is that Republican recalcitrance to a muscular response to Covid-19 has led to many more deaths in Republican areas than in Democratic areas. David Leonhardt reported in the November 8 edition of the New York Times that “the gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.”

What was in earlier stages of the pandemic a relatively small difference had become a chasm by last month. As the Leonhardt reported for the Times, “In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.”

The widening gap is the result of the deployment of vaccines, their effectiveness, and the concentration of vaccine refuseniks among Republicans. GOP sympathizers are being hoisted on their own partisan petard.

Leonhardt opines that “this situation is a tragedy, in which irrational fears about vaccine side effects have overwhelmed rational fears about a deadly virus. It stems from disinformation — promoted by right-wing media, like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, the Sinclair Broadcast Group and online sources…”

True, but I would not use the word tragedy. Irony, yes.

Deluded, you dig a grave for everybody by refusing vaccination and torpedoing mandates, and you infect other people but end up in one of those graves yourself.

Tragedy? The real tragedy is all the people you infected and who have died because their immune system is compromised (through chemotherapy, very advanced age, organ transplantation, AIDS, and other causes) and they cannot be vaccinated, or the vaccine doesn’t work for them.

It is a hard thing to say, but this looks to me more like Darwinian natural selection than tragedy. Natural selection works against the deluded and the dumb.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psTw2dztE6A&t=1s

Aaron Rodgers, the star quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, has given a clinic of the combination of delusion and dishonesty involved in vaccine denialism. When reporters asked Rodgers whether he had been vaccinated, Rodgers tried to mislead the journalists and the world by saying that yes, he had been “immunized.” The media failed to ask him the obvious question, “What do you mean by that?”

The reality was that Rogers had been taking the veterinary medicine ivermectin and homeopathic medications that don’t confer immunity. Confronted by critics with his lie when it turned out he tested positive for Covid, Rodgers, characteristic of vaccine denialists, tried to turn the tables, using prefabricated Republican talking points, portraying himself as the victim of a “woke mob” and “cancel culture.”

Watching him defend himself by claiming he was allergic to some components of the two leading vaccines, it was evident that Rodgers was making it all up as he went along. Which components? How do you know?

It all reminded me of true crime segments on Forensic Files and Discovery ID. Confronted by police detectives and the evidence, suspects weave an ever-changing story of innocence. Generally, it is an obvious lie that the police don’t buy. If he had a medically valid reason for refusing the vaccine, Rodgers could have stated that at the outset and asked his doctors to attest to it. I don’t know what party Rodgers supports, but he shares a serious allergy with many Republicans: allergy to the truth.

That may have caused his team, his teammates, and his fans disappointment last Sunday when they lost their latest game. Rodgers is a very accomplished player and a very bad liar.

Rodgers has not been chastened by the critique and has taken a philosophical turn in his defense. He claims he has a high regard about the “autonomy” of his body, pure BS. But does he have the same regard for the life of his teammates and coaches?

Obviously not. Will players on the offensive line that protect him from the rushes of fearsome defensive players have second thoughts next time? Rodgers, having thrown his teammates under a bus, should from now on be on the lookout for oncoming buses.

Scottie Pippen, the Chicago Bulls basketball great, in an interview about his new book which takes Michael Jordan to task for playing selfishly, said it well when comparing basketball to golf, a comparison valid also for football: “It is a team sport not like golf.”

Defeating Covid-19 is a team sport with stakes like no other. Getting people, like Aaron Rodgers, to accept and abide by reason and evidence is like herding cats, an impossible proposition. And there are tens of millions like him. Will reason or delusion prevail?

I am not sure. I believe that most people will refuse to drink the equivalent of cult leader Jim Jones’s poisoned Kool-Aid and opt for reason, life, and solidarity. But who knows? Lies have become the currency of one of our two major political parties, the GOP. The more deaths the more they can blame Joe Biden and the Democrats for not fulfilling the promise of stamping out the pandemic.

A major problem is that Covid-19 is not so deadly that no one would risk contracting it — like rabies which is almost 100 percent fatal without vaccination. This gives anti-science forces wiggle room to deny and delude and for deniers to rationalize their choice not to join in a common front to end the pandemic via vaccination.

In this, like in so many things like free universal health care, death plays on the side of the right and the Republicans. For this, and for the avoidable mass death there should be a reckoning. But will that happen?

The American innocence complex, unlike the well-earned German guilt complex over the Holocaust, is alive and well. The fuss over critical race theory is an indicator that many Americans are not ready to assume the truth about our nation’s history. It is a bitter pill indeed and many folks would like to continue drinking sweet Kool Aid.