Stunning Levels of Lies and Disinformation causing non-compliance and vaccine hesitancy
There's panic in the US as the Delta Variant spreads. It's now the dominant version of Covid-19 there. Meanwhile, vaccination rates are hovering around 50%. A lot of people are refusing to get vaccinated or wear masks. Only 29% of unvaccinated Americans think Covid-19 is more dangerous than the vaccine.
They've been told otherwise by health officials, government officials, and news reports. Are they stupid?
No. That's not it. It's distrust, unprecedented levels of distrust in all of our major sense-making institutions.
Why? Well, let's just remember how the whole mask debate started.
In February of 2020, people were just becoming aware of something called "the new coronavirus." My husband warned about this in early January. By February, with only six cases here in British Columbia, he urged people to wear masks.Nobody would do it. They insulted him for offering masks. The reason was simple: The authorities said don't wear masks. Canadian and American health authorities and the World Health Organization all said: "You don't need masks!", "Save the masks for health care workers!"
That's crazy. My husband made a video in mid-March showing people how to easily make a mask with a filter without any sewing. Still, they kept saying, "don't wear masks." It was only later that the authorities finally urged people to wear masks. By then, Covid-19 was everywhere.
Some people forgot this after a year of commands by authorities to "wear masks!" Health officials, government officials, and the news all tell us how important masks are and how "anti-maskers" are bad people.
This turn-around got people wondering. Was the government lying before? Or are they lying now?
Either through dishonesty or incompetence, the public was told something completely incorrect. Of course masks help prevent the spread of Covid-19. It's an airborne disease. Just putting cloth or a paper towel between your lungs and air breathed by others can save lives. They also told us -- for over a year -- that Covid-19 wasn't airborne.
Back when there were no known cases of Covid-19 in Canada, but it was already killing people in the Far East, people were coming off international flights and nobody was taking their temperature to check for fever like was done during the SARS epidemic. Instead of screening international travelers, authorities and news media urgently told us the important thing was to not call it the "Wuhan Virus" because that's racist.
Way too many lies
Both political factions know politicians and reporters lie. They can't miss it. Politicians and news media on their side constantly call the other side liars. Almost all Democrats believe that everything said by Trump or Fox News is full of lies.
Nobody to the left of Trump seems to realize that approximately half of America thinks it's Biden, CNN and MSNBC who are the liars. The lying is more widespread than the pandemic.
This is why so many Americans do not believe what they are told, even by "experts" on the news. They know they are lied to by their political enemies. They know that those enemies have lied to them for decades.
"No Evidence"
Many recall election night 2020, when it looked like Trump had won. The next morning, it had completely turned around and the mainstream media were saying Biden won. Everyone in America seemed like they were vehemently on one side or the other based on which political party they favored. As soon as the official results were in, media organizations reported as fact that Biden had won. When Trump disputed this, the media constantly called his claims "baseless". Almost every article said there was "no evidence" to back up his "baseless" claims.
When they said there was "no evidence" for Trump's claims, that was... a lie.
No matter how unconvincing the evidence may be, it's not "no evidence." There is alleged eyewitness testimony by two men working for the US Postal Service who claim to have seen two different election irregularities. I'm not saying this is true or would make any difference. I AM saying that IT IS evidence. It is evidence that was extremely well known at the time. Countless articles in the days after the election in seemingly every media organization that wasn't a right-wing propaganda operation was putting those two words -- "no evidence" -- in every article about election disputes. Every time they said it, it was a lie.
How did that look to Trump's voters? According to the official results, that's nearly half the voters in that election. They saw almost every newspaper and TV news network say "no evidence". They also saw Trump's Twitter account where he posted pages of links to evidence. Then Trump's Twitter account disappeared from existence, the links to the evidence were gone, and the news media continued to chant in unison, "no evidence," "no evidence," "no evidence." This is not how you build trust.
The pro-Democrat news media are gaslighting everything the conservatives complain about. Absolutely everything. The Atlantic recently published an article with the title, "There is no debate on Critical Race Theory." Meanwhile, debates on Critical Race Theory are all over the internet, social media, school board meetings and in state legislatures.
News media also said there were no riots, just "mostly peaceful protests". There were no calls to actually abolish police, no bias or conspiracy of any kind against Trump, not in the FBI, the media, or anywhere. Also, no one is ever racist against white people; that's a white supremacist delusion. Hate is only possible in one direction, there is nothing but love on the left. No feminists ever hated men. No mostly peaceful protesters ever hated anyone. The lies are endless. Nobody seems to understand that this has severely eroded the public's trust in the institutions we use to make sense of reality. Those institutions, news media, government, even universities and scientists, have lost all credibility with half the American voters.
People don't trust liars -- nor should they. But next election, how will they know who won?
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Facts for References
https://usafacts.org/
visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/
https://news.yahoo.com/unvaccinated-americans-say-covid-vaccines-are-riskier-than-virus-even-as-delta-surges-among-them-090056685.html