Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/26/more-than-100000-dead-of-covid-in-uk.html
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Virtually everything done wrong, over and over again, reason and evidence mangled at every stage by Britain’s witless leadership, state incapacity and malignant press culture.
The GOP may now be a death cult, but for most of my life the Tories (aided by the Murdoch outlets) have in their actions (and sometimes their words) expressed an inherent desire to “decrease the surplus population”. I can’t help thinking that de Pfeffel and his coterie secretly – perhaps not consciously – see this pandemic as an economic opportunity not to be wasted.
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For Boris Johnson, 100,000 dead is a feature not a bug.
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reason and evidence mangled at every stage by Britain’s witless leadership, state incapacity and malignant press culture.
Careful of trying to find blame to place when we’re dealing with a virus that seems to be a perfect product of evolution for infecting and killing humans.
I know we want to point to a human source of fault for all our problems, especially when it reinforces are personal politics and preferences, but sometimes it’s just not there.
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Rarely a truer sentence typed. I try not to make fun of the US government’s disastrous response to this over the last year when in many ways our own has been worse because it turns out we have our own murderous death cult in power.
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We are talking about the Tories here. Other countries have handled covid far better than they have.
Do we need to make a list of Dominic Cummings and his eugenicist remarks to make it clearer?
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In the course of a week, in the U.S. we’ve also seen a night-and-day difference in the response to the pandemic when an administration that values society and science and international co-operation replaces a regime grounded in selfishness and ignorant denialism and isolationism. COVID is COVID, but politics and ideology do play a major role in how we address it.
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Mr Hanlon’s cutting implement can be applied here. With one caveat - there has been no mistakes made by the Tories in enriching their friends/family/supporters though hastily drafted “emergency” contracts they get paid for, then don’t fulfil.
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It’s a real surprise that Cosplay Boris - never one to shirk a photo opportunity with the tame press - hasn’t put on a yellow hi-vis vest and used one of his backers’ little JCBs to dig a grave for the lunchtime news.
It’s the least he could do, his policies have helped fill 100,000 of them.
What’s almost as appalling is that the media aren’t making a huge deal that our death rate is twice that of Germany, five times that of Denmark and 14 times that of Norway - it’s even outstripping the US.
No one with any power seems to want to ask the question - why is it so bad here, and is it anything to do with government policies? There’s a story to be told here for anyone wanting to do the ground work.
And yet the BBC’s chief political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg can write nothing more than:
Not quite ‘thoughts and prayers’, but the likes of Kuenssberg and Peston over on ITV are hardly holding the government to account. They’d rather be well-paid gossip columnists with lots of access than actual journalists.
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Florida is on track to have offered the vaccine to every nursing home and assisted living facility in the state by next week. Good job, Governor Ron DeSantis
An opportune moment to dig out this little gem again…
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That’s certainly the Faux News take on things:
Oh yes, he’s done a bang-up job all along… /s
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That’s only allowed when Labour is in charge
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Laura Kuenssberg (and all BBC staff) may not express partial opinions on their Twitter or other social media accounts.
The problem we face is that there really does not seem to be an alternative that would handle it any better.
You can count on @beschizza to include a dig at the end of any negative report on the UK, well-deserved or not.
died within 28 days of a positive text
@beschizza - I think this shows just how deadly SMS can be when they are sent by 5G.
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It’s really not perfect. It could be a lot worse which is of course what scientists have been pointing out for years each time some new epidemic starts.
“It could still be worse and next time might be the time it is. Maybe we should prepare for that? No, too expensive, can’t be bothered? Ok…”
The horrible thing is that even with the vast sums being expended and the wails about lost GDP and the loss of life due to economic shutdown, ‘won’t someone think of the businesses?!?’, I can bet that after a brief period paying lipservice to pandemic preparedness, we’ll go right back to underspending and underpreparing.
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Except in this case, it absolutely fucking is. The conservative government not only wildly mishandled the outbreak, they actively made things worse. Their early approach was to discount how serious it was, fail to take action and then adopt a so-called “herd immunity” strategy (more accurately, “get everyone infected,” which is neither herd immunity nor effective for doing anything other than getting a lot of people killed). Some members of the government were pretty open about the eugenicist aims of that strategy. Time and time again they ignored the medical advice. Vital government roles were outsourced to companies run by friends of the administration, and those jobs were consistently botched. Social distancing and travel restrictions were inconsistently and ineptly implemented, and flagrant violations of those rules by members of the government were simply shrugged off, undermining them. At one point, alarmed by the economic impact, rather than give financial aid to struggling businesses, the government actually encouraged people to eat out in restaurants, going so far as to subsidize them. Entirely predictably, there was a huge outbreak as a result. Other massive infection spikes were the direct result of government policy.
The virus may be a natural disaster, but what’s happened to the UK is almost entirely a man-made one. An ostensibly first-world island nation, that was well placed to deal with the virus, instead has one of the worst infection rates in the world, and once the overburdened NHS finishes collapsing, probably one of the worst death rates, too.
Except he publicly stated that it wasn’t the state’s job to have any role in distributing the vaccine, so they were leaving it to everyone else. That may have been his way of avoid responsibility for how badly the distribution has been going (because by and large, it has been), but it also prevents him from being given any credit, too.
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Well that source certainly looks unbiased.
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I would have summed up their response as “Fuck 'em,” but your comment covered the details…
If somebody could convince Johnson that dead people won’t bring in any tax revenue before we all die here that’d be great.
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