Re: I am struggling to understand why patients decide not to get the covid vaccine

Dear Editor

Covid denial is the latest, but won’t be the last manifestation of a Malignant 30 year campaign the undermine science, STEM practitioners and all forms of related expert knowledge.

Frist tried at scale and with significant success by tobacco companies, who understood the power of emphasising doubt and uncertainty, the real damage was done by the fossil fuel industry which, along with its supporters, covertly helped set up multiple apparently authoritative bodies (Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Heartland Institute…), then pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the systematic undermining of climate science and scientists. The end result of this is that emissions of climate-altering gases have continued to rise exponentially for the last 30 years, putting at acute risk the future of complex human civilisation and most of the natural world.

These “Successes” were helped by huge investments in lobbying and influencing politicians. But the most damage was to science itself, with increasing numbers of the general public swayed by expertly-configured propaganda that portrayed science and scientists as corrupt and self-serving (a successful attribution of the motivations of the liars onto those struggling to find an objective truth). This projective methodology, widely adopted across increasingly extreme right wing political parties, amplified by the malign power of social media, has led to the proliferation of “alternative truths”, about “chem-trails”, vaccines, medicines, and the denigration of any sources of evidence-based or objective historical knowledge: teachers, universities, doctors, etc.

The people in the ICU are victims of that toxic cocktail, which works well to cloud political debate and disguise the real winners and losers in the economic sphere, but fails to change the behaviour of viruses. They just happened to have found the wrong form of “truth”. Their suffering and deaths are just the overture to countless numbers who are already suffering and dying in accelerating numbers from Science Denial in all its lethal simplicity.