As with nuclear fallout zones, social media comment sections speaking to current affairs can be extremely hazardous places.
Occasionally there might be a nugget of constructive insight, but by and large they do little to promote debate or provide any real solution. Even the most seemingly innocuous subject will quickly descend into a bunfight pitting subscribers of one ideology against those of another, effectively creating rival echo chambers.
Comment sections do have one redeemable quality, even if it is not particularly useful to those embroiled in the online melee. To outsiders, the responses can give a fairly good indication of where the land lies in terms of public sentiment.
US president Donald Trump has done just about everything to deflect from his country’s coronavirus crisis, though one fears it is too little, too late for the incumbent.
A quick scan of US social media pages reveals a deep-seated resentment of the Trump administration for its handling of the pandemic, and all the “Sleepy Joe” Biden jibes in the world will not change that.
Trump, cultivating an image of a titan of industry (he is not, as it turns out), placed all his stock in building a formidable economy, but Covid-19, as elsewhere in the world, has put paid to that.
Record case numbers are being posted in the US, and Trump’s bravado is no match. Sadly, that has been the case from Day 1.
In recent weeks a documentary streaming on Apple TV, Totally Under Control, has gained a lot of traction both in America and abroad for the manner in which it separates fact from the spurious rhetoric spewed by the
White House press office.
It successfully dispels the well-worn notion that everything would be OK because the government said so, a conceited, improvident approach that has backfired spectacularly.
Juxtaposing the US and South Korea response to Covid-19, director Alex Gibney and collaborators show that the outcome could have been so different had scientists been allowed to do their jobs without political interference.
It is especially disheartening to hear the testimonies of infectious disease specialists whose countless e-mails to their bosses were ignored because what they had to say would not sit well with Trump brownnosers.
Dr Rick Bright, whose served as the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (Barda) between 2016 and 2020, tells the filmmakers that in October 2019, a pandemic “playbook” to guide the response in the event of a virus outbreak had been prepared under the “Crimson Contagion” programme.
Essentially, Barda and other agencies created a pandemic simulation from which several lessons could be learnt.
As Bright explains, the problem was not that mistakes weren’t identified; it was that the wrong people were in place to correct them.
On January 18 this year, Bright asked for an emergency meeting to be convened about the pandemic’s threat to America, but to his shock, he was told that the situation was not as grave as he made out.
Crimson Contagion had also identified that there could be massive problems securing sufficient stocks of person protective equipment. Again, this was ignored.
Bright and his team had estimated that 3.5 billion N-95 masks were needed to protect health workers, but the US only had a fraction of this number and, to make matters worse, the masks were five years past their sell-by date.
Mike Bowen, one of the few remaining producers of respirators and face masks in the US, warned everyone the supply chain would collapse and people would die.
“At the end of January, I’m hearing from all over the world that people are freaking out about masks, and that’s when I got hold of Rick and said, ‘This is going to be bad. (I said) you can’t protect America’s population, that’s too late. But I can at least make enough masks to protect America’s healthcare workers,” Bowen says.
Every communication from Bowen to Bright was passed on to the US’s highest strategic stockpile decision-making bodies.
Says Bright: “The response I got was ‘We will just change the CDC (Centres for Communicable Diseases) guidelines, and we’ll just tell people don’t do that (wear face masks)’.”
It an astonishing example of the callousness the Trump regime shows for America’s citizens. In South Korea, which reported its first case on the same day America identified a person in Seattle as its own Patient Zero, there are fewer than 30,000 cases today.
There are nine million people infected with the virus in the US.
●‘Totally Under Control’, directed by Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, and Suzanne Hillinger and starring Alex Azar, Charlie Baker, Scott Becker is streaming on Apple TV. This in-depth look at how the US government handled its response to Covid19 has a run time of
2h 3 min.
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