Our business, political and economic leaders know what it takes to meet safely during the #COVID19 pandemic. These are the same people telling us we can safely work in offices, gather at conferences, and conduct business in crowds without protection or testing. It's almost as if they know something they're not telling us and value each others' lives more than ours.
@augieray I’d say it’s more about the fact that not all nation-leaders meeting share the same politics about COVID so they agree on a common standard. I might be wrong, just a thought.
@danvanmoll I have no idea what that means. If they can settle on a common standard for themselves without political differences, doesn't that just mean they know what it takes to protect each other (and us.)
@augieray I don’t think so. I believe most participants are like “not necessary, but well, I’ll get tested for the sake of it”. Otherwise they would have stricter standards in national parliaments, too - wouldn’t they?
@danvanmoll How can they have stricter standards in parliaments without it raising questions why they won't enact stricter standards for everyone? The WEF gives them protection from that question, but if they had to acknowledge COVID is an evolving and immediate threat to "important" lives, it would only shine a light on the risk they're encouraging for everyone else in the interest of economic or political convenience.
@augieray So they'd rather take the risk than endangering their narrative?
@danvanmoll If you can come up with another sensible explanation for why, when leaders gather during the pandemic, they take precautions but won't suggest the same for everyone else, I'm open to it. Biden already announced the pandemic is over, and the US CDC acknowledged it isn't raising mask advisories because citizens aren't willing to respond. I think all the evidence is available to support leaders would prefer risk life and health than acknowledge they've mishandled pandemic response.
This both-sidesing is, in my opinion, highly counterproductive.
One political side, and *only one*, has chosen to wage war against public health as a means of destroying its supporters' connection to reality, cementing their fanatical loyalty, and increasing political power at the expense of democracy itself.
The problem is not "our business, political, and economic leaders" in general.
I think the nuance here is appropriate.
One side politicized it and is actively encouraging anti-vax and mass infection. No doubt. None of that is good.
While DeSantis is enacting these things, as you say, his kids are homeschooled and the public tours of his house(the Governor's mansion) were cancelled for years and now only allowed when him and his family aren't there. As with many politicians he's a hypocrite.
All of that is true.
The other side capitulated. Biden said it's over. Jha says he lives life like 2019. Becerra said it's over. "You have the tools" when we really don't and they're about to get really expensive to boot. The CDC under Biden's a total mess.
That's true, too.
Neither "side" has the moral high ground here. I don't think there's any need to defend *any* of them here. They all failed public health.
I'm not with you here. "Neither side has the moral high ground" is patently wrong, and extremely harmful when millions of lives are at stake.
Republicans are not merely "worse." DeSantis' public health bans have cost thousands of Floridians' lives. Yesterday, while he was proposing even more pro-death legislation, Biden's DOJ was arguing before the 11th Circuit, trying to reinstate the mask mandate on commercial airliners.
Shades of horrible is all you're arguing in my opinion. Are Republicans worse here? Absolutely. Are Democrats bad? Yes! There's no defense for it.
Who knows how many Democrats have died because Biden said it's over and NPR repeated it? One was in my family. I know that much. I don't like to make scientific arguments personal, but, deaths are deaths and both Democrats and Republicans have blood on their hands here, IMO. Failed public health is failed public health. We shouldn't be arguing how much public health failed. It failed. Under Biden's watch and Trump's.
Agree to disagree on that point, but I'm not going to say that COVID has been handled well the last two years.
First and most importantly, I'm terribly sorry about the loss of your family member.
The GOP hid the existence of COVID from the American people. Knowing that COVID was coming, they actively prevented ramping up PPE production, causing many health care workers to suffer and die needlessly. The Postal Service was about to send 5 masks to every US household, but then Trump's White House blocked that plan. They wanted to make it look like nothing was going on.
Trump boasted, on national TV, that he was deliberately withholding lifesaving ventilators and other medical supplies from states with Democratic governors. He literally bragged that he was killing Americans. Jared Kushner also deliberately killed Americans in blue states, because he believed this would provide a political advantage to the Republican Party. These are actual crimes against humanity.
The GOP claims that COVID is a hoax, that masks and vaccines don't work. They have incited numerous acts of violence against health care workers. They claim that masks are equivalent to slavery, and that vaccines cause people to become magnetic. Tucker Carlson said that putting a mask on a child is child abuse, and he ordered his millions of viewers to act accordingly against a child's parents if they see a child wearing a mask.
I agree that America has handled COVID atrociously. Mostly because the GOP whipped its followers into a state of violent psychotic rage against science. DeSantis just convened a grand jury to imprison doctors and scientists for doing their jobs. Republican voters want to murder Tony Fauci.
I think it's important to maintain perspective, because this is getting worse. DeSantis was just reelected, because too many Dems wrongly felt that "both parties are the same."
None of that, except your last paragraph(I currently live in FL and that's not why he was reelected), is wrong. DeSantis won because, one, Floridians LOVE him and, two, the Democratic Party is almost non-existent here. People outside of Florida, particularly outside of the south, have a hard time understanding it, but him and people like Gaetz are ridiculously popular down here. Over 70% of people in the county in which I live voted for DeSantis. They LOVE him more than any politician in the world.
Now, that part of politics aside, tell me what Biden has done to make it better? He didn't help by saying it was over. I'm honestly grasping at straws trying to figure out something I can praise him for here. By multiple accounts that I've read even the First Lady apparently thinks he's lost his mind on COVID policy and doesn't take it seriously enough.
Or the CDC? Walensky didn't help by calling masks the scarlet letter of the pandemic, or sticking to the bogus green maps, etc.
On and on.
Democrats have had two years to make it better and haven't is all I'm saying. They've capitulated and given room to the right wingers to deny and minimize by *going along* with it, mostly via silence. That shouldn't get them parades and awards. Over 700 people a day above the previous baseline died in the US in 2022.
They're not doing a good job.
I'n going to try to declare nuance again here. Not a single thing Republicans have done has been good. No one is arguing that. But give me the giant list of great things that Democrats are doing right now that they deserve credit for.
Well, in general, the list of Democrats' accomplishments during the last Congress is enormous. It was clearly the most productive Congress since the 1960s. I was stunned by this, frankly, because I wasn't expecting much with only 50 Senators.
On COVID, though... not so stunning. The $1.9 Trillion COVID relief bill was big. The govt rushed out tests and vaccines effectively. But Walensky's messaging was one stupid unforced error after another.
Biden said "the pandemic is over. We still have a problem with Covid. We’re still doing a lot of work on it." He was echoing a WHO statement that "the end of the pandemic is in sight." But he screwed it up. Unlike Walensky's incompetence, I don't think that gaffe was such a big deal.
Biden was handed an impossible situation: A once-in-a-century pandemic, during a domestic civil war, in which a fascist insurgency convinced half the country to refuse to participate in any public health efforts at all.
I don't disagree with any of that except the "gaffe" was massive. I tend to think he thought that out and said it very purposefully because he didn't want voters scared off of in person voting in the mid-terms, but, that aside, it literally killed and disabled people who trusted Biden to tell them the truth. I promise you that it did.
But what do you do in a situation where you make rules and people don't want to follow them? Give up? How about the IBCC just quit making building codes. Builders don't like them. Or, as @augieray says(sorry for blowing up your thread) how about no more drunk driving laws? A lot of people ignore those.
I'm saying you can't capitulate when lives are at stake, and Democrats did. That's all.
That capitulation is going to continue killing and disabling people, too. The vaccination rate in my county has dropped under 90% overall. More than 1 out of every 10 kids entering the school system aren't vaccinated for *anything* anymore. It's a slippery slope issue and Democrats chose to give up on public health rather than fighting for it and even if they reversed course now I'm afraid it's too late. As a scientist and a citizen who has to live and work here I find that awful.
To be 100% clear, at the same time I can also agree that it would be way worse if Republicans ran everything.
We're mostly saying the same thing, but I just can't bring myself to say that abandoning public health after other people tried to destroy it is OK just because they didn't join in on actively destroying it. There was a window in which the CDC and the administration could have made bold choices for public health and chose not to.
We should keep in mind, too, that the mask mandate ruling that you're talking was from April of 2021. That was 21 months ago. The CDC did not even ask for a stay of the ruling. That was a political calculation. If they'd cared about the mask mandate they would have tried to keep it in place. This is all theater at this point.
@BE @barney @danvanmoll Republicans have been worse without a doubt, but let's not let Biden off the hook that easily for declaring the pandemic over. Or for his CDC leader failing to mention masks. Or that the CDC continues to push that useless COmmunity Levels map rather than the more vital and useful Transmission Map. There is plenty of blame to go around, and while I agree Trump, DeSantis and others in the GOP have been particularly awful, that doesn't make every Dem a hero by comparison.