Ten years ago, who would have ever believed that in the middle of a pandemic that has killed as many Americans as 1,000 commercial airliners crashing and burning within a period of 8 months (each of them carrying 250 passengers), many of us would have preferred political leaders who would falsely tell us that there was not a serious pandemic and we could simply go on with our lives? In the abstract, that proposition would have been absurd, but here we are.
Here is Christopher Christakis, a voice I trust on both the medical issues and on the political landscape regarding COVID (click through to hear the short statement).
If you’d like to hear more from Christakis, listen to Making Sense podcast #222 (with Sam Harris):
Trump’s actions regarding C19 were the final straw, but not in the way the popular narrative would have it. In January he was called a racist and xenophobe for shutting down first air travel to and from China, then air travel from and to Europe. Biden and other Democrats delighted in making light of the virus. In late February, Nancy Pelosi invited everyone to visit Chinatown–it was “perfectly safe.” In March, when WHO stopped pretending there was no human-to-human transmission, Democrats did a 180 and suddenly Trump was wrong for everything he did regarding C19. As late as April Bernie Sanders was still proclaiming we had no reason to close the borders.
Trump needed to tell his critics to comment on the videos documenting their belittling of the danger, but in the meantime he had a country to save. He didn’t do that. His initial instincts were right, but he proved a coward. He joined the Democrats in downplaying the seriousness. He missed the signal to tack into the wind, and drowned. He wasted time reacting to personal attacks instead of attacks on the truth. I don’t want a coward overwhelmed by his own ego as President.