For the past five years or so, I have felt like I was living
in the Twilight Zone. With all of the
science denying and ‘alternative facts’ which are pure fabrications and
falsehoods, it seems like a large portion of our nation’s population has lost
all sense of reality. Now, we face a resurgence of Covid 19 hospitalizations
and deaths due to gross misinformation about the efficacy of the corona vaccines.
This situation would be bad enough if it was merely the result of deceptive
websites. But ultra conservative news
sources and elected government officials are contributing to the low
immunization rates in our nation by echoing the nonsense. We might as well just send the doses overseas
to countries that would welcome them.
I have been fully vaccinated since April and feel personally
protected from serious health consequences regarding the pandemic. Nevertheless,
I am deeply concerned about the rest of our countrymen. We have already matched the total number of
deaths from the Spanish flu of 1918. I
wonder how many more deaths it will take for our citizens and political leaders
to come to their senses.
As I was considering the situation recently, I had a
revelation. At this point, 99 percent of
the people who are dying are those who are unvaccinated. This is particularly critical in states with
high numbers of politically conservative citizens. The impact of this on the voting results in
the fall elections of 2022 and beyond may be quite interesting.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if the efforts of conservative talk
show hosts and legislators to promote the antivaccine movement actually reduce
the Republican voting base and usher in sweeping wins for Democrat candidates
in state and federal elections? Of course, death is not the only result of
Covid infections. Many Victims are left
with long lasting health issues that are extremely debilitating. It is possible that the voting restrictions
being pushed through Republican controlled state legislatures may further
reduce Republican voter participation due to hardships associated with mail in
ballots.
Many white citizens are concerned about the shifting ethnic
demographics in our nation. It will be
interesting to see if the reluctance to obtain vaccines results in a higher
death rate among whites and an acceleration of the demographic transition to a
greater non-white population. If so, conservative whites will have facilitated the
very thing that they fear.
President Biden is receiving a great deal of criticism over
the government’s door-to-door effort to promote vaccinations. I wonder if it wouldn’t be prudent to
restrict these efforts to communities where access to healthcare is limited and
withdraw from those communities where there is active resistance to
vaccination. It would be a shame to waste federal dollars on those who are
opposed to this extraordinary effort by the government to save their lives.
Consider what is going on in the media. Ultra-conservative commentators like Tucker
Carlson and Laura Ingraham are encouraging the vaccination doubters and helping
to perpetuate the death of more than 200 people daily. If the Democratic Party had execution squads
in the streets killing 200 Republican voters daily, law enforcement would be
frantically attempting to end the slaughter and right-wing citizens would be
demanding federal intervention. However,
media celebrities are accomplishing the same results with no apparent uproar
from their conservative audience.
In recent days, some conservative political leaders have
begun encouraging citizens to be vaccinated.
The speculation is that they do not want their political party to be
associated with the alarming rise in infections, hospitalizations and deaths
from Covid 19. Is it possible that they
have also recognized the potential impact on the size of their voting base?
There appears to be a profound evolutionary process at
work. Those who respect the scientific
approach are taking advantage of the protection from the Corona virus that
science offers. Meanwhile, the science doubters are leaving themselves
vulnerable to this increasingly contagious and deadly virus. It is almost as though nature is in the
process of purging our species of those who are irrational.