Kicking COVID Before It Kicks Back

During my recovery from COVID, a side effect was the depressingly large number of well-wishers who thought I’d succumbed to coronavirus prior to 2022. Their fatalistic attitude was either, “Well, hasn’t everyone already gotten it?” or “Your kids had it last year, and I naturally assumed you contracted it as well.”

If the worst, least experienced, criminal enterprise masquerading as a presidential administration hadn’t dismantled the worldwide pandemic task force in 2017, perhaps COVID-19 wouldn’t have gone further than Asia.

If our country rallied behind an intelligent, science-believing, unified response in 2020, perhaps 400,000 people wouldn’t have died that year.

I’m fond of reposting versions of meme insisting “If Fox News had existed in the 1950s, we would still be fighting polio.” These “boycott Fox advertisers” movements don’t understand that merely a minute portion of the network’s revenues come from sponsors. The non-news propaganda outlet makes most of its money from blackmailing cable carriers that crave the Fox-owned sports channels. The carriers pass the costs through to subscribers.

Even if you never watch a minute of Fox programming, you are paying up to two dollars a month to subsidize a corporation that eagerly promotes insurrection, anti-vax conspiracy theories, pro-Russia sedition, racism…