Hacker News Reader

Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

The problem was that it was politicized hard early on. Now you have roughly a third of the country who’ve been told that public health measures are an unpatriotic plot, and a lot of belligerence had been encouraged. The rhetoric around this made it a very clear party loyalty test and lots of people rose to that challenge.

How many people are willing to admit that they were so wrong for the better part of two years and many thousands of people died who wouldn’t have? That’s very close to admitting that those same people weren’t just lying about one thing.

View on HN

I’ve spent months in 4 different countries since Covid hit and it’s politicized everywhere.

Not sure how you can force people to stay at home, kids out of school, then hand out billions in relief (or not in one country) and not have it be political?

I was specifically thinking about the politicization of protection and treatment. The economic impact was definitely always going to be a debate but basic safety measures like masks and vaccination didn’t used to be a strongly partisan issue (think about how American doctors historically leaned Republican for tax reasons).

Different countries matter less in the internet era, too. In the English-speaking world, the Murdoch media set the message in the US & UK, of course, but these days that spreads quickly outside of national borders and it was easy to see those messages jump to other language communities on social media. This was especially accelerated by the early recognition of certain risk factors which were compatible with the strong man posturing common to a lot of right-wing ideology.

> I've spent months in 4 different countries since Covid hit and it’s politicized everywhere.

There's a world of difference between criticizing a government for imposing a lockdown at 10pm instead of 11pm or enforcing a 80% occupancy limit instead of 50%, and attacking basic public health measures like taking a vaccine based on sheer lunacy and conspiracy theories.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com