https://howtohideapandemic.substack.com/p/how-to-hide-a-pandemic
"No one could have predicted this. No, really.
In the years before Covid, the word “pandemic” would have conjured visions of
bodies in the street and rioting, maybe. Or maybe it would have been more like
the movie “Contagion” or “Outbreak”, with soldiers in full hazmat suits
helicoptering in to isolate towns, and a heroic race to find a cure (all within
the neat confines of a two-hour runtime, of course).
Not gonna lie, the notion that a raging global pandemic would be met with
apathy and a global, Public Health-led effort to downplay its severity- while
doing almost nothing to deal with the crisis- was not on our pre-pandemic bingo
cards.
And yet, here we are now. Four years in, the pandemic response (such as it is)
has devolved into propaganda. Public Health agencies have emphasized Public
Relations as the primary tool for crisis management, and a crop of “science
communicators” has sprung up out of obscurity to help shepherd public opinion
and guide it to a happy place. Reflections on the failure of the CDC, for
example, have focused on a need to revamp scientific communication rather than
do anything of substance.
But four years is a long time to hone the art of “nothing to see here”
propaganda. And the pandemic’s never-ending new waves of viral variants have
had a repetitive cadence to them- a predictable sequence of rises in case
counts (but low hospitalizations), followed by rises in hospitalizations (but
low levels of death), followed by rises in deaths (but falling case counts).
That repetitive quality has allowed for a certain eco-friendly reusability when
it comes to propaganda messages. Every six months or so, some part of the news
cycle gets devoted to the idea that we are finally out of this, that cases are
lower than ever before and it’s milder than ever before. Experts come out of
the woodwork to confidently predict (again) that this means that we have herd
immunity now, or hybrid immunity, or that it’s endemic (thank goodness!), or
maybe all three. Of course, this has been going on from the beginning of the
pandemic, but no one seems to notice.
In this post, we will explore some of the tools and tricks of the sorry public
relations exercise that passes for public health these days. It helps to know
what they are- once you start seeing them, you can’t stop!"
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: December 28, 2023
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-95419817
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
