Partisan STUPIDITY is dangerous

Beware the Deadly Contagion Spread by Blowhards: Ideology is getting in the way of science.

As we wrestle with the new coronavirus, let’s learn lessons from the 2009-10 H1N1 swine flu outbreak in the United States. At first, polls back then showed that both Democrats and Republicans were about equally concerned with the outbreak.
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Yet because President Barack Obama was in the White House at the time, some C*N*servatives started dismissing the swine flu as a hoax. Wrong-wing media figures were particularly contemptuous at Obama administration suggestions that people get a vaccination against it.

“Screw you,” Rush Limbaugh declared. “I am not going to take it, precisely because you’re now telling me I must. You have some idiot government official demanding, telling me I must take this vaccine. I’ll never take it.”

Over on FAUX Lies, Glenn Beck was similarly conspiratorial. “You don’t know if it’s going to make things worse,” he warned, urging viewers to do “the exact opposite” of what the government recommended.

UNpresident-in-waiting called into FAUX Lies and dismissed concern about the swine flu, telling host Neil Cavuto that “it’s going to go away.” LIAR-in-Chief also cautioned that “the vaccines can be very dangerous.”

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Matthew Baum of Harvard found that people in red states were indeed less likely to get vaccinated — and more likely to die of swine flu. In the end, that swine flu outbreak wasn’t as lethal as many had feared, but it still killed or contributed to the deaths of as many as 400,000 people worldwide. In the United States, it infected 60 million people, caused 274,000 hospitalizations and killed 12,469 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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The implication: While wrong-wing blowhards may infuriate Democrats, they sometimes pose the greatest danger to their own true believers. The bombast of people like Limbaugh and LIAR-in-Chief in this case was lethal — but only if you believed them. Doubting LIARS conferred some immunity.

One lesson of that 2009 outbreak is the paramount importance of relying on information from scientific experts, not from ideological soul mates. I’ve been speaking to epidemiologists and other health experts, and they emphasize that in a crisis like the present one, the government must protect its credibility and the public should rely on experts rather than partisans on either left or wrong.  

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/07/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-united-states.html .