Or, The Weaponization of Stupidity

People believe what makes them comfortable. 

When I was about 11 years old, I saw in a book that newborns can distinguish shapes and shadows. Many of my classmates believed humans are born blind. When I mentioned what I had read, not only did I get arguments, but anger. So I brought the book into class and showed it to my classmates, but that only increased the anger. “I saw my baby sister when my mom brought her home from the hospital,” one girl snarled at me. “And her eyes were closed.”

A lesson learned. 

COVID-19 is not our first pandemic. But our reaction to it is different from others. Why?

It’s the denial. 

The denial even of the existence of COVID-19 as a pandemic, of the suffering it causes, of its deadly impact. The denial that young, previously healthy people are dying of this disease. 

Gasping denial even from people infected and suffering. 

Along with denial goes rejection of common-sense, proven methods to mitigate the spread and impact of the disease. 

I don’t need to mention the truly loony conspiracy theories that vaccines kill, or are a way to track us; the fools who believe those ideas are a narrow, but very vocal fringe.

The problem is the responsible people, the leaders who refuse to limit gatherings, who refuse to ask people to wear masks, who refuse to wear masks themselves and who repeat misinformation.

This misinformation—in a word, lie—has very real impacts. Suffering. Death. 

Last month, Pastor Robert Smith of Gospel Light Baptist Church in Amherst, N.S. held a “gathering of faith groups” from across the province. He did not ask the 100 attendees to prove their vaccination, nor enforce any other public safety measures. The province traced three deaths from COVID-19 back to that gathering. Pastor Smith said he did nothing wrong, and the deaths were “part of God’s plan.” 

Lightning strikes close

For over a year, I felt very lucky in that no one in my family had been infected. I read about social media friends and acquaintances, celebrities, journalists and others getting infected. I heard news reports about people in my community. Even some co-workers went through it. But in my family, no one was infected.

Until a couple of weeks ago. My father, age 87, was in hospital awaiting back surgery to relieve debilitating pain. Surgery that was delayed day after day for a month because the Manitoba hospital was overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases. Finally, after a month of waiting—and getting weaker because he was spending most of his time in a hospital bed—he got his surgery. It went well, but less than a week later, he was diagnosed with COVID-19. To be clear, he was fully vaccinated at the time.

It turns out that an unvaccinated person entered the hospital, exposing dozens. Soon the hospital was closed to all visitors. Only essential health care providers were allowed in.

So there was my father, suffering from COVID-19 while trying to recover from extensive back surgery. I spoke to him once by phone, and he could barely say three words before gasping for breath. 

I write this not to evoke your sympathy, but to illustrate the very real impact of this pandemic has on real people. Millions have died, isolated and alone, around the world, and several times that number have suffered horribly.

Thankfully, we have had vaccines for close to a year now. Close to 90 percent of eligible people in Canada have been vaccinated, and vaccines for children are about to roll out.

And yet, the denial and refusal continues. Numbers of infections and deaths are climbing again, reaching record levels in some areas. We are facing a fourth or fifth wave.

It’s a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” seen in children and in people who refuse to be vaccinated.

Why?

Why have we reacted differently to this pandemic than we did to H1N1, or SARS (also a coronavirus), or to influenza a century ago? 

Over and over again, leaders and politicians have made bad decisions about the COVID-19 pandemic. Decisions they knew were bad when they made them. Not only doctors and experts predicted deadly outcomes; common sense told us that congregating without masks would lead to with higher numbers of infections, suffering and death. 

Yet, we had political leaders repeatedly “opening up,” relaxing proven, effective public safety measures. And repeatedly, these same leaders have had to impose restrictions again, after just a couple of weeks.

How many times do we have to receive this same lesson?

Weaponizing stupidity

There have always been deniers of vaccines, of disease theory, and of science in general. Think of the opponents of evolution, of flat-earthers, creationists or climate change deniers. There are people with these beliefs even today, even in prosperous Western nations, people who use the Internet and persist in science denial. 

Who will insist that newborn humans are blind.

These people are few, but social media has amplified their stupidity. 

But what amplifies them more, what gives these brands of stupidity frightening amounts of power, are the unscrupulous leaders who have learned to weaponize this stupidity. 

These leaders don’t care about the loony theories, nor about the people who believe them. But these leaders, like Pastor Smith, like the previous President of the United States, like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, know an opportunity when they see one.

An opportunity to increase their own power, wealth and comfort. So they use their power and influence to tell gullible people what they want to hear:

• that COVID-19 is not really a pandemic, it’s not that bad when you get it, those who warn you it’s bad are the people you should fear, and if you do get it and you suffer, they have some magic cure
• that the stories your parents and grandparents told you, that the flat world was made in six days, six thousand years ago, are really true, and anyone who says different is going to hell, anyway 
• that the world is not getting hotter, and you can still drive your big truck as much as you like
• that simple, easy measures to protect others, like wearing a mask or getting vaccinated, are violations of your vaguely defined rights 
• that your childish fear of needles is a valid excuse for spreading a preventable disease, and you can dress that phobia up as religion if you want to 
• that all those scientists and analysts and leaders who are trying to convince you that the world is round, and not the centre of the universe, are the people you really have to fear, and don’t worry, the snake-oil salespeople will save you.

What to do about it?

I do not know.

All my life, I have encountered people with beliefs that defy reality, objective evidence, even the things that they themselves do. 

Like people who believe that “they” are tracking all of us, and want to use vaccines as a way of injecting tracking technology into our bloodstream, and who share this belief with their smartphones. 

Or that universal, taxpayer-funded health care is somehow bad. 

I really do not know what to do about this. People believe what they want to believe. 

And so we suffer.