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He is 81 years old, and obviously, his job is not joyful. Or, rather some people he is dealing with, are not just angry about him, but outright murderous. Just a few days before Christmas, a man identified as Kuachua Brillion Xiong, was stopped by police on a highway in the state of Iowa, his car loaded with an AR 15 assault rifle, ammunition, and body armor (Des Moines Register, December 30, 2021)
The 25-year-old Californian resident was on his way to Washington, DC- to kill President Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Biden and Trump “face of the nation’s coronavirus response- and a target of some supporters of President Donald Trump”(Politico, April 1, 2020).
Mr. Xiong is one of the millions, who blame Fauci, chief medical advisor of Biden, for using vaccine shots to control and manipulate them. They accuse Fauci of conspiring against their freedom.
A Republican State Senator from Wyoming, Anthony Bouchard, posted a meme on his congressional campaign Facebook page, and suggested next to a Fauci photo and a superimposed hanging noose on the gallow: ”After the prosecution, the chair, the gallows or lethal injection?” WyoFile (September 10, 2021). Bouchard wants Fauci tried for “crime on humanity.”
Lara Logan, a commentator on the right-wing News channel Fox News, did not suggest death for Fauci, but implied publicly that he was an American version of Dr.Josef Mengele, a SS-doctor assigned to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The Auschwitz Museum condemned the comparison of Fauci to Mengele (who was never arrested, and drowned at the coast of Brazil in 1979) as “a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline.” (Haaretz December 2, 2021) To critics of her statement the journalist answered that they”’ had taken a leaf out of Goebbels’s Nazi playbook.”
“The revolt against reason”, as the IPS Journal (Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft) (December 7, 2021) suggested, is not limited to the US and the Anti Fauci posse.
Western Europe, wrote Robert Misik, an Austrian author, “experiences a massive loss of trust in the entire political system. Its depth is displayed in the revolt against Covid 19 and science”. Demonstration with tens of thousands of people are reported in Berlin and Paris, anti-vaxxer propaganda, reported Bloomberg (June 30, 2021), spreads in Asia, “endangering millions since false claims are fueling vaccine hesitancy.”
These days, writes Misik, the diagnosis of ‘polarization’ is being invoked almost daily in a specific context: “That is the anti-virus regime, with the disputes over lockdown, rejection of vaccination, denial of the pandemic or its danger and the rise of conspiracy theories”.
A bubble of bogus truth
This too is global, but there are nonetheless notable national differences. In the US, opposition to measures to contain Covid 19 is a common slogan of the radical right under its front figure, the former president, Donald Trump. In other countries that is less pronounced.
In Germany, for centuries, hospital professors were considered “Gods in white”, admired for wisdom and scientific expertise, ever ready to save lives. Now, complains German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, a Harvard educated medicine professor himself, “a small group is willing to wipe all scientific knowledge off the table and voluntarily enter a bubble of bogus truths”. Worse, reported DW (Deutsche Welle, November 14, 2021 ) Covid deniers and anti-vaxxers are” threatening German doctors”.
Threats, confirmed DW, ”become routine, especially for doctors who actively promote vaccines on social media.” The coronavirus pandemic, notes openDemocracy, a London-based independent global media platform, (March 31, 2021) “has been accompanied by an explosion of inaccurate or misleading information.
Conspiracy Theory
Around the world conspiracy theories have gone viral, spreading claims that Covid 19 was created in a laboratory, that is part of a sinister economic plan, or that lockdowns are merely an excuse for governments to crush civil liberties.” George Orwell’s “1984” suddenly has returned as a bestseller, buyers ready to confirm that Big Brother, invented by the British socialist writer, is real and alive, active everywhere around the globe, ready to establish a corona dictatorship.”
“Given its obvious madness”, reflected Robert Misik in “the astonishing thing is that a not insignificant part of their followers buys into all this craziness. Those who believe the whole radical nonsense is rather few” he, said, “but a large group have doubts about medical science and are less willing to believe experts than people who pontificate on the internet.”
Misik noted in his research, that “there is evidently a massive loss of trust in the entire political system, so that they may no longer believe anyone perceived in any way to be part on an imaginary establishment’. Those who fall into the clutches of such an ideology and an entire system of misinformation come to believe ever more absurd things. They remodel themselves, so to speak, and fall into a dynamic of self-radicalization-which can very soon become truly dangerous.”
The covid infodemic
One sentence uttered by French president Emmanuel Macron in an interview with Ronan Tésoriere in Le Parisien (January 5, 2022) provoked his opponents enough for some to dream of another storm onto the Bastille: “Les nonvaccines j’ai très envie de les emmerder”. Is Macron planning to hassle his people, or just piss them off, does he only plan to be a pain in the ass, or, regardless of translational freedom, just force them to abide by rules and law, “les emmerder” until they accept to be vaccinated?
An estimated four million French adults are without a single jab, and the truth is, that the unvaccinated, disproportionately, are the majority in the hospital or dying. The covid related ‘infodemic’, stated the World Health Organization, WHO, “ is just as dangerous as the virus itself.”
In 2019, confirms John Elflein on Statista (October 27, 2021), the WHO named vaccine hesitancy as one of the ten leading threats to global health, citing complacency, inconvenience in access, and a lack of confidence as the driving factors.
Macron passed his law in January through parliament with a 214 to 93 majority, making the vaccination pass a must to be able to attend a café, Ballet or football stadium.”Now take your jab” reminded the Washington Post (January 10, 2022) French readers still hesitating, “or sip your champagne at home.” In his opinion column, the Washington Post writer James Mc Aucley praised on January 11 the Macron decision to ”emmerder” the national vaccine resistance to the bitter end:” Macron has set a fine example for other world leaders refusing to kowtow before ignorance or honor selfishness.”
”The self-declared, German anti-vaxxer movement, Querdenker (literal thinker), some of them political fringe groups (right), esoteric, conspiracy fanatics, or just afraid of feeling the needle or addicted to natural medical remedies, turned Germany, reported openDemocracy (March 31, 2021), into ground zero for the Covid infodemic, “the biggest hotbed of QAnon outside of anglosphere-a cultish worldview centered on conspiracy theory that a global elite of politicians, celebrities and governments is secretly trafficking children”.
On August 29, hundreds of their group and some fringe rightwingers, tried, in protest against government coronavirus restrictions, to storm the Reichstag in Berlin, the historic German parliament, their action not only reported by main media outlets, but Russian financed propaganda tools, their RT (Russia Today), Sputnik News Agency (now SNA), and Pravda.
Throughout the pandemic Russian media regularly interviews protesters and voices critical of the German state observed open Democracy,”allowing them to speculate about Covid 19, while presenting them as neutral experts.” RT DE and other Russian outlets attended and live streamed “Querdenkers “protests with links widely posted on Telegram,an encrypted messaging and social networking app, which is amassing some 70 000 followers, spawning more than 1200 local channels and groups .
”Until the end of the last year the top tennis professional of the world, Novak Djokovic, could pretend to be a poster boy of the global anti vaxxer community. Apparently the Serb, 34 years old, hesitated to accept being vaccinated, and on December 16, he was tested positive, two days after attending a crowded basketball match.
A day after his test, he handed trophies to tennis talents, and he was honored with the issue of his photo on the nation’s stamps- without mask. The day after he was notified to be positive he sat down with French reporters of L’Equipe, the sports newspaper. Did he tell them, he was positive? On December 30, the top star was practicing in a tennis club near Spanish Marbella.
The video was placed on the internet, but at his arrival five days later in Melbourne, January 5, 2022, Mr. Djokovic apparently declared at immigration, that he did not travel elsewhere during the past last 14 days. Yes, he forgot Marbella, and that false declaration on the landing card, which was deplorable and not his fault. Sorry.
The Australians informed him that he would have to leave. His father could not understand, why the Australians caused so much fuss about a missing jab. His son was treated like Jesus, he said, yes Jesus, crucified like him, possibly less painful, since Jesus ended on the cross and Djokovic on a first-class flight on Emirates to Dubai.
