What Has Happened to America and Americans?
By Dr David Laing Dawson
During the COVID pandemic almost three times as many Americans as Canadians per 1 million population died.
As the pandemic approached and then arrived on this continent both countries enacted public health measures to mitigate the consequences of the spread of this virus. At the beginning no one knew exactly how the virus was transmitted, nor what populations would be at most risk of serious illness and death.
Public health measures can be advised and voluntary, or mandated in several ways and through several jurisdictions.
Through very recent scientific advances and technologies a vaccination was quickly developed. This could also be recommended or mandated for specific groups of vulnerable people, or for those most like to carry the virus from one jurisdiction to another.
Masks, distancing, closure of assembly, theatres, schools, recreation facilities…..
The pandemic is over now, the COVID virus relegated to annual annoyance. Many of us get the vaccination yearly, targeting the most prominent or expected mutated variant.
This is life on our crowded, warming, travelling, and interdependent planet.
Other viruses and bacteria will arise and be quickly spread. And for each we will want to quickly figure out how they are transmitted, how serious and deadly they are, and what populations are most at risk. And from this decide what public health measures might be most effective.
So it is time, logically and rationally, to have experts look closely at the public health measures (vaccination mandates, closures, masking, distancing, general health care) taken by each country (and states and provinces within those countries) in the world as COVID-19 swept through Asia, Europe, and the Americas, and look equally closely at the outcomes, the numbers infected, the use of ICU’s, the deaths, the vulnerable populations, and as many variables as possible.
And then make recommendations for future pandemics.
Instead, in the USA, an anti-science, anti-vaccination movement is afoot. Experts and facilities devoted to identifying and monitoring new (and old) infectious agents around the world have been shuttered. Many politicians are preoccupied with the question of COVID emerging in a lab or a market place (in order to lay blame), and poor Dr. Fauci must sit through a senate hearing being insulted and blamed, and told he is a disgrace, by MAGA senators who are still upset, it seems, that they were advised to wear masks in public places.
Although I am afraid an anti-science, anti-expert, blaming attitude, along with keeping the population anxious, confused, and under siege, is all part of the path to a fascist state.
