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Book Review and Poll: RFK [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-12-04  

Today’s book review: The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

This book is hardly a rock-solid scientific treatise. But it does stimulate interesting questions.

RFK takes controversial positions, not all of which are completely wrong. Plenty are, though. He also gets quite hyperbolic. Example here: “Suddenly, those trusted institutions seemed to be acting in concert to generate fear, promote obedience, discourage critical thinking, and herd seven billion people to march to a single tune, culminating in mass public health experiments with a novel, shoddily tested and improperly licensed technology so risky that manufacturers refused to produce it unless every government on Earth shielded them from liability.”

Please.

There are, however, are lots of lessons to be learned from this subject.

Among them: America’s failure to grapple with hard questions has consequences. Big consequences. America’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic is a big example. Here Americans’ tribalism, social-media addiction, and Democrat-versus-Republican super-rivalry all culminated in a large-scale policy catastrophe.The pandemic raised really hard policy questions, to be sure. Contrary to some of RFK’s assertions, simple solutions were often elusive. There was plenty of room for legitimate disagreement. And it’s very important to remember that things are much clearer now, in hindsight.

But neither side struck a rational balance with its approach. Many on the left didn’t weigh heavily enough (or at all) the profound economic and psychological impact of shutting down businesses and schools by government fiat. Nor did they remember that governmental authority is vested in elected officials and not the experts who advise them. And they made far too many credibility-straining overstatements about Covid’s impact — which was largely confined to people with serious health problems and the elderly. RFK pointed a lot of this out.

But conservatives were a whole lot worse. Tens of millions of them refused to take even simple measures to protect themselves and others from a pandemic that would end up killing millions. Instead of simply wearing masks, avoiding large indoor gatherings, and getting vaccinated, they railed against these prudent policies just as hard as they did against the imprudent policies. The consequence wasn’t just being wrong. Lots of people died who otherwise wouldn’t have.

As is now typical, there was no logic or necessary reason for the political divide to be drawn as it was. Conservatives could just as easily have been pro-vaccine, giving the incumbent Republican administration credit (rightly or wrongly) for the vaccines’ speedy development. And liberals could just as easily have rallied around keeping schools open, as lower-income students were among the worst hit by school closures.

For whatever arbitrary reasons, the ideological lines were etched as they were. And once they gained traction, the tribal bandwagons piled on.

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