How America Lost One Million People

[babylonsister]

https://politicalwire.com/2022/05/15/how-america-lost-one-million-people/

How America Lost One Million People
May 15, 2022 at 8:07 am EDT By Taegan Goddard

New York Times: “The magnitude of the country’s loss is nearly impossible to grasp.”

“More Americans have died of Covid-19 than in two decades of car crashes or on battlefields in all of the country’s wars combined.”

“Experts say deaths were all but inevitable from a new virus of such severity and transmissibility. Yet, one million dead is a stunning toll, even for a country the size of the United States, and the true number is almost certainly higher because of undercounting.”

“It is the result of many factors, including elected officials who played down the threat posed by the coronavirus and resisted safety measures; a decentralized, overburdened health care system that struggled with testing, tracing and treatment; and lower vaccination and booster rates than other rich countries, partly the result of widespread mistrust and resistance fanned by right-wing media and politicians.”

[LetMyPeopleVote]

1. One million deaths is mind blowing

[Hekate]

6. I know, & we know that's a gross undercount, too...

I got one thing right and one thing wrong at the outset.

The thing I got tragically wrong was believing that US government agencies would get a handle on public safety measures in about 3 months. I could not conceive that my own country would — well, Trump. I could enumerate the horrors of his response, but we all know them, up to and including stealing shipments of medical supplies off the tarmac at airports.

The thing I got tragically right was when Dr Fauci said we could lose as many as 100,000 and I muttered, “It’ll be a million.”

[keep_left]

7. I remember that several states (NY was one) ran spy operations to prevent Jared...

...and his cronies from stealing supplies. It was later confirmed that they used some undisclosed custom spycraft technology to ensure that they could hide in plain sight. That's how corrupt the Drumpf regime was. It was like the Cold War within our borders.

[Diamond_Dog]

2. The anti vax religion zealots just shrug and say

“It was God’s will.”

[Tomconroy]

3. Very good article. Well worth a read by everyone.

[keep_left]

4. As for the right-wing media, you can thank everyone from RooshV to Emerald Robinson...

...among many others, imbeciles all. Robinson was so extreme she even got fired from NewsMax (!). She now works for PillowMan; she has a show on "LindellTV", which is really just his shitty "Frank Social" website. Robinson also has a monetized Substack because she got banned from Twitter. She is utterly obsessed with antivax crap and she obviously hasn't spent a day in a biology class, so lacking is her understanding of basic science.

Of course, every far-right network from OANN to EWTN pushes antivax garbage all day long as well.

[Initech]

5. Because we had a president who told people to drink bleach and take malaria drugs.

And that president got elected because people are so addicted to the god damn right wing propaganda sphere that they can’t see that what they were doing is wrong. So really, right wing propaganda is mostly to blame for this.

[pidge]

8. The 1918 flu killed a larger percent of the population though.

[BannonsLiver]

9. "All of which we at the Times contributed to by elevating the anti vax conversation."

I encourage everyone to follow NYT Pitchbot on Twitter. It’s a daily often satirical savaging of the “both siderism” the NYT epitomizes.