The Last Of Coronavirus

The US government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic sure has been similar to its handling of climate change, huh? Just accelerated to play out over the course of only a few years, as opposed to several decades (if we’re lucky).

You can really see the parallels when you look at it in partisan terms. On one side of the military-industrial capitalist duopoly, you have Republicans, whose leadership mostly had to be dragged kicking and screaming to even recognize the danger’s existence, then began downplaying it once it became impossible to ignore; all the while displaying open distrust or outright hostility towards science, and peddling so much misinformation and deranged conspiracy theory that now the main disagreement between members of their voter base seems to be over whether there’s any crisis at all, or whether the crisis was deliberately engineered by Jews, black people, Mexicans, and/or the Chinese as part of some nefarious plot to curtail “muh freedoms!”

On the other side, you have the Democrats, once again depending on their long-held strategy of standing next to their uglier friend in order to look better by comparison, and even then somehow managing to look worse when it comes to certain details. Sure, they “trust the science,” but what good is that if they still don’t do everything the science says must be done in order to prevent (or at least mitigate) existential catastrophe? There isn’t a functional difference between half a bridge or no bridge at all to the person whose life depends on getting over a massive gorge.

Surrounding both sides are mounds of the dead, sacrifices to the corporate-friendly people-mulcher that prints money on paper made from flesh with ink made of blood; the human cost of both parties’ miserable failure to adequately address either problem.

With climate change, you have things like the Inflation Reduction Act, which made superficial investments in “green energy” industries (emphasis on that last word), but simultaneously increased oil and gas production—even though “the science” has unequivocally said that continuing to do the latter, even at the rate we already were, means almost certain doom for anyone who can’t afford some kind of bunker in the near future. And that’s the best case scenario! We’re already experiencing freak, “once-in-a-generation” weather events multiple times per year while the current administration, like each of those before it, continues dragging its feet on actions that needed to be taken decades ago—when it isn’t actively making things worse, anyway!

With COVID, you have Biden pushing (but not really enforcing) mask mandates and launching programs for vaccination and testing, which were definitely improvements over Trump favoring quack medicine while barely doing either, but the difference has been rather blunted by the President and his associates repeatedly pretending like the pandemic was winding down or over, even while new, more contagious mutations appeared, and deaths under his watch surpassed Trump’s already criminally-negligent record.

Plus, there was both presidents’ refusal to get every man, woman, and child the support they’d need to weather any effective or meaningful quarantine, because doing so might have disrupted their owners’ ability to profit more during the pandemic than they’d ever profited before! This is one of those areas where Biden’s actually done less for most Americans than Trump did, by the way, distributing only $1400 in direct stimulus, compared to Trump’s slightly-larger but still far from adequate pittance of $1800, while discontinuing emergency unemployment benefits after only half as long as they were reauthorized by Trump. I don’t know about you, but I’m still waiting on that $2000 check Joe promised me back in 2021.

The coronavirus pandemic’s been going on for more than three years, at this point, which is even longer than the infamous flu pandemic of 1918 lasted. There still doesn’t seem to be any actual end in sight, but in yet another flagrant (if not surprising) rebuke of “the science,” Biden apparently thinks the best way to deal with it now is to just arbitrarily declare the emergency will end in May, 2023, completely abandoning everyone to be preyed upon by some of the mangiest, most despicable vultures who’ve ever roosted in the pharmaceutical industry swooping in to greedily quadruple vaccine prices.

“My work is done here,” Biden says, “You’re on your own now, folks!”

As if we weren’t all along!