Why Strongmen Are Losing the Fight Against Covid

[appalachiablue]

Last edited Sun May 23, 2021, 03:52 AM - Edit history (2)

'Why Strongmen Are Losing The Fight Against Covid,' Robt. Reich, May 16, 2021.- Ed.

~ President Biden says he plans to call a summit of democratic governments to contain the rise of authoritarianism around the world. I hope he talks about its rise in the United States, too – and the huge toll it’s already taken on Americans. ~

A hospital in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, is being charged for sounding the alarm over a lack of oxygen that resulted in Covid deaths. The owner-manager says he has been accused of “false scare-mongering” after he stated publicly that four of his patients died on a single day when oxygen ran out. Since Covid-19 exploded in India, prime minister Modi seems more intent on controlling the news than the outbreak.
On Wednesday, India recorded nearly 363,000 cases and 4,120 deaths, about 30% of worldwide Covid deaths that day. But experts say India is vastly understating the true number. The dean of Brown Univ. School of Public Health estimates that at least 25,000 Indians are dying from Covid each day, a horror increased by shortages of oxygen and hospital beds. Yet Modi and his government don’t want the public to get the true story.

- One big lesson from the Covid crisis: lying makes it worse. -

Putin is busily denying the Covid truth in Russia. Alexei Raksha, a demographer at the official statistical agency, says he was forced to leave last summer for telling the truth.
He claims that the daily data has been “smoothed, rounded, lowered” to look better..
“If Russia stops at 500,000 excess deaths, that will be a good scenario,” he calculates. Russia was first out of the gate with a Covid vaccine but has fallen woefully behind on vaccinations. Recent polls put the share of Russians who don’t want to be vaccinated at 60 to 70% because Putin and other officials have focused less on vaccinating than on claiming success in containing Covid.

The U.S. is suffering a similar problem – the legacy of another strongman, Trump. Although more than half of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine, more than 40% of Republicans have consistently told pollsters they won’t get vaccinated. Their recalcitrance is threatening efforts to achieve “herd immunity” and prevent the virus’s spread. Like Modi and Putin, Trump minimized the pandemic's seriousness and spread misinformation about it. His officials ordered the CDC to downplay its severity. He declined to get vaccinated and was noticeably absent from a public announcement with all other living former presidents. Trump media allies have conducted a vaccine scare campaign- Laura Ingraham posted a story purporting to show evidence that Chinese communist party loyalists worked at pharmaceutical companies that developed the coronavirus vaccine.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson opined in mid- April that if the vaccine were truly effective, there’d be no reason for people who received it to wear masks or avoid physical contact. “So maybe it doesn’t work, and they’re simply not telling you that.”

Why then should anyone be surprised at the reluctance of Trump Republicans to get vaccinated? A recent New York Times analysis showed vaccination rates to be lower in counties where a majority voted for Trump in 2020. States that voted more heavily for Trump are also where lower percentages of the population have been vaccinated.. Trump’s Republican Party is coming to resemble authoritarian regimes around the world in other respects as well – purging truthtellers and trucking in lies, misinformation, and propaganda harmful to the public...

More, https://robertreich.org/post/651395372743376896




- Trump and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi.




- Trump and Vladimir Putin, President of Russia.

[ShazzieB]

1. I figured out how to tell which world leaders are the biggest douche canoes.

The more Trump likes them, the douchier they are.

The ones that are his favorites are practically douche ocean liners.

[appalachiablue]

2. A growing club, birds of a feather group

that seems to be expanding across the globe yearly. Why wasn't Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro, 'Trump of the Tropics' included?

- U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro exchanged football jerseys during the Brazilian president's visit to the White House. Trump presented Boldonaro with a United States Men's National Team jersey and Bolsonaro reciprocated with a Brazil football team jersey emblazoned with the number 10 worn by many Brazilian soccer legends including Pele. https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-of-th...