
How did so many in the United States end up desensitized to mass death and disability, angrily opposed to almost all means of mitigating an occasionally fatal airborne virus, and willing to accept so little from the powerful? How did the wealthiest nation in the world -- and, on paper, the nation seen as best prepared to meet a pandemic -- fail, and continue failing, so epically? The Public Health Disservice Awards ("The Snowzzies") tries to answer these imponderables. [...]
Our awardees are the intellectual authors of a noxious form of pandemic-era groupthink; the Snowzzie awards recognize their outsized efforts to normalize a disaster and manufacture public consent. Occupying positions in academia, medicine, journalism, and government, they have worked to inculcate the belief that life is back to normal. If things seem otherwise, that is a "you" problem. Everyone else, we are told, has moved on.
Particularly good are the ties for the category "Achievement in Public Health Disservice by a Group of Organization" from UCSF, thanks to Prasad, Wachter and Gandhi, and from Stanford, thanks to Ioannidis, Bhattacharya and Atlas:
What happens when you take a prestigious institute of higher education, plant a right-wing think tank on its campus, and grant tenure to a flock of iconoclastic libertarians who I can only imagine dream of bathing in the blood of the poor?
No, this isn't a thought experiment. It's Stanford University.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
The Stanford entry is very much written in the style of JWZ. Brutal sarcasm in the service of social justice.
Incidentally, I watched the news this morning... on KRON-4. 🙄 They were reporting about the recent flu spike - no other viruses of this "tripledemic", just the flu - and I braced myself because usually they'll fall back on the "expertise" of notorious UCSF anti-masker Peter Chin-Hong. Not this time. No, this time they went straight to the source: Monica fucking Gandhi.
I clicked off before her face could trigger me. I watched KRON-4 because it's not an affiliate of Fox or the like and they do tend to have a more local focus (though they are now owned libertarian apologists/"both side"-ers NewsNation), but after lots of shit this year, the above is just another reason for me to look for my news elsewhere.