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Comment by apostacy | Hacker News Reader

Debunkers got people killed. Facebook, Twitter, and most of the mainstream media suppressed early warnings about COVID.

Warnings that we should wear masks were called fake news and anti-Chinese racism.

And every single person I know who is smug about how ignorant other people are for not getting vaccinated ignored warnings about COVID because it wasn't on a major social media platform or cable television.

Every single person I know who needlessly wears a mask and loves showing off how smart they think they are denied that this was coming until it was far too late.

If COVID had happened in 2014, it would have been much less of a problem because people would have been able to communicate with each other.

I wish I could say that people have learned from their mistakes.

If you were wrong then, isn't it possible you are wrong now?

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This post is amazing because it seems to have come from a completely different universe than the one I inhabit.

In my world people were having early concerns about COVID in January. We were getting sporadic reports from China and it was bad. Experts were saying that it was only a matter of time till it got to the US and the worst part was that we didn’t have enough stockpiles of face masks for everybody. There was advice to save masks for medics and first responders until the supply situation improved.

People were already in a panic and buying up all of the toilet paper for some reason. Then in March the cases spiked and the lockdowns came.

If you were getting a lot of misinformation then maybe you should consider your sources. If someone was lying to you in 2020 they are probably still lying to you.

Warnings that we should wear masks were called fake news

Every single person I know who needlessly wears a mask and loves showing off how smart they think they are denied that this was coming until it was far too late.

Pick a lane buddy.

> Warnings that we should wear masks were called fake news and anti-Chinese racism.

It was, and here is an additional irony: In the beginning, downplaying COVID-19 with Chinese people (especially people from Wuhan) did not go over well and was not appreciated: "This is transparent pandering. I don't care how 'not-racist' you are towards me; my family members are dying and my city is in an apocalyptic lockdown so you can shut the fuck up about how this 'isn't serious'". Maybe said more politely, but definitely thought.

C'mon, wouldn't you be angry if your granddad were in the hospital on oxygen, and everyone around you, rather than acknowledging the gravity of your situation, was instead busy making whatever self-serving noises Buzzfeed told them to? This is a total failure of empathy, it completely underestimates peoples' ability to see right through you, and it's othering.

There are lessons here:

1. You should worry about the truth or falsehood of a belief rather than the assumed political consequences of that belief.

2. You should engage with people not to demonstrate to them that you hold "good beliefs" -- this is a persistent mistake made by white liberals; they think what they profess to believe is something that matters -- but rather to work together towards shared goals.

And, at the beginning of a global pandemic, there should have been a hell of a lot of shared goals.

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