Monkeypox scare didn't work.
— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) October 12, 2022
Polio scare didn't work.
What will they try next?
David is a Ph.D., not a medical doctor. He's an Israeli entrepeneur who works in AI. He's also a COVID denialist.
When David writes this, he knows what his like-minded audience believes: that the entire public health response to COVID was a cynical attempt by evil people to seize power even though they knew what they were doing wasn't protecting public health. Anyone who made vaccines, urged the use of vaccines, advocated or enforced quarantines and lockdowns, and recommended mask-wearing was clearly selling snake oil, according to this view, because the measures didn't flawlessly shut down transmission, disease, and death. There's no possibility of good faith on our side. There's no possibility that we wanted better results and are frustrated because we haven't been able to obtain them. There's no possibility that we didn't want the whole fucking world turned upside down, but the alternative seemed to be allowing the entire planet to become New York City in April 2020.
And now the alarms raised about monkeypox and polio "didn't work." Didn't work in what way? Apparently we were able to fake a COVID crisis and upend everything in 2020, and we'd love to do it again, but we can't -- presumably because too many people are based now, like our friend Dr. Eli. It can't possibly be because we've seen only isolated cases of paralyzing polio. It can't possibly be because monkeypox proved not to be contagious in the way COVID is contagious. It can't possibly be that we raise alarms in the hope of preventing another COVID, or even preventing a lesser health crisis, and the system worked, more or less -- many people in the affected population got vaccinated against monkeypox, while the sexual activity that was spreading the disease was curtailed somewhat because men who have sex with men told one another it was necessary for the community and many men got the message. In the case of polio, there's been some increase in vaccination in populations where vaccine uptake had been low. That's what we wanted. What "didn't work"?
But to the contemporary right, nothing is merely principled disagreement. In the past, political arguments were about conflicting beliefs: Abortion opponents said even a zygote was a human life, while reporoductive-choice advocates argued for women to have the right to personal autonomy. On issues like public health, we're beyond that. The right believes that everything we did to fight COVID was in bad faith. Everything was a comic-supervillain conspiracy to take over the globe -- but somehow, in two recent public health crises, we couldn't pull off the con. (That's because the based army is winning!)
We can't have a democracy -- here or in the rest of the democratic world -- if this is how we're arguing.
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