Healtheworld:stopthepandemicofignoranceandirrationality_America

时间：2020-12-31 16:46:16 来源：作者：网络转载

原标题：Heal the world: stop the pandemic of ignorance and irrationality

The Washington Post published an article titled “No vaccine can end America’s pandemic of ignorance and irrationality” on Dec. 23, 2020, noting that the biggest divide in the modern society is between those who are rational and those who aren’t.

As the pandemic goes on, a gap becomes more and more conspicuous in modern America for entering a state where the author of the article described as being “both impressively smart and dangerously dumb”.

“There is a vast, unbridgeable chasm that separates the brilliant scientists who came up with the coronavirus vaccines and the ignoramuses who believe that the coronavirus was engineered by Bill Gates to profit from vaccinations, or that it was created as a bioweapon by China, or that it is spread by 5G cell towers, or that it doesn’t actually exist, or that its dangers are vastly exaggerated, or that masks are either useless or harmful in stopping its spread,” biting criticism carried out in the article, “this pandemic of misinformation helps explain why the United States is among the countries with the highest covid death rates in the world despite having the most sophisticated medical sector.”

The pandemic reveals the resistance to reason among roughly a large part of the modern world, which may continue to pose a long-term danger to the global society. Articles posed on Poland mainstream media Rzeczpospolita and Wyborcza.pl also shared similar views.

Some politicians no doubt worsened the pandemic of misinformation by misleading the general public to name one country to take the blame for spreading the pandemic to the US and the whole world. Nonetheless, failed to act sooner in the face of the coronavirus due to blind optimism, “incorrectly believing that the virus will not spread to Europe and America, or the epidemic will end when the temperature rises, or even only Asian people are susceptible to COVID-19”, the article pointed out.

In the face of the sudden crisis, the West has never experienced a public health crisis similar to the Covid-19 pandemic in the past hundred years since the outbreak of the Spanish pandemic, and has failed to effectively learn from China’s experience in dealing with SARS prevention and control measures in the early stage of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Chinese government controlled the epidemic in the shortest time through resolute and effective actions, and bought time for other countries, but the unfortunate reality shows that it has been a shame for most of the western world to miss out the golden period of epidemic prevention. No country other than one self should be responsible for it.

Besides, it is also worth noticing that dislike the general belief of the western countries, Chinese people played an important part in implementing the pandemic prevention and control measures, not being forced by the authority, but mostly out of the trust for the government’s willingness to put people’s life and safety in the first place, and the ability to mobilize all sectors of society to participate in the fight against the pandemic in a rational, timely and coordinated manner.

On the sad contrary, the US seems to be caught in a pandemic of irrationality at the moment. New survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation recently showed that 27% of those surveyed said that they “probably or definitely” won’t get the coronavirus vaccine, even though it has been proved safe and effective.

Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, estimates that 75% to 80% of the population will need to be vaccinated to stop the transmission of the disease, achieve “herd immunity” and allow the resumption of business as usual. “Getting there will be a struggle,” The Washington Post commented.

As physician Sanjay Gupta said on CNN: “The vaccine can help save us from the disease, but it can’t save us from ourselves. We must do that.”

Find the original article at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/22/no-vaccine-can-end-americas-pandemic-ignorance-irrationality/游戏网

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