Charles M. Blow of the New York Times has written about unreason in relation of vaccines. He also saw that part of the reason for vaccine hesitancy could be explained by reference to their holder’s political beliefs. Unfortunately, in the United States and Canada, Covid-19 has become a hot political issue. This started when Conservatives asserted that they did not believe Covid-19 was real.  This movement was led by Donald Trump the President of the United States who originally said ‘Covid is a hoax’. He believed and convinced many of his followers that left wing liberals were trying to make him look bad and were trying to interfere with their freedoms. As a result, astonishingly, the richest country in the world became the largest victim of covid-19.

Blow summed up the history this way:

“Nothing better exemplifies the gaping political divide in this country than our embarrassing and asinine vaccine response. Donald Trump’s scorched earth political strategy has fooled millions of Americans into flirting with death. And now thousands are once again dying for it.

Almost from the beginning, efforts to combat the virus were met with disdain from a president who felt the crisis made him look bad. The science was denied. We came to live in a world where masking was mocked and ingesting disinfectant was offered up as a possible cure.”

 

This is what a world messed up by politics looks like. Every day I hear stories about people who refused to take the vaccine for the feeblest of reasons. Repeatedly people distrust physicians and government officials in favour of something they have “learned” from the Internet or their friends. How can that be?

Blow recognized that religion brought with it unreason in its trail. And that was not a pretty sight:

“The optics of countless socially distanced funerals is less offensive to those conservatives than the optics of being socially distanced in a Fuddruckers.

It was all lunacy. It is all lunacy. This should never have happened. There are people dead today — a lot of them! — who should still be alive and who would be if people in the heights of government and the heights of the media had not fed them lies about the virus.”

 

The result of course is frequently disastrous. As Blow concluded,

So, we have a situation in America where people are dying and will continue to die of ignorance and stubbornness. They are determined to prove that they are right even if it puts them on the wrong side of a eulogy. This is like watching millions of people playing in traffic.“

As Goya said,” the sleep of reason brings forth monsters.” What else can one expect?