On Politics, War by Other Means — 06

“Grooming” is real. Trumpublican voters are being groomed to believe that the coming Climate Shock is “natural”.

An examination of a disinformation campaign.

I am mostly a Climate Change writer. But when the pandemic started, Covid was all that I wrote about.

As an analyst I thought I did pretty well. In my sixth month report on the virus in July 2020 (We have reached the end of the Beginning - A Review of what we know), I only got one thing wrong. I was adamant that there wasn’t going to be a vaccine that year.

I didn’t know that there was a large pre-existing body of research on a vaccine for a SARS virus. I had forgotten about the first SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2003–2004.

It’s easy to forget about that one because it was contained. Globally, only 8,096 people got infected. It was a blip on most people’s radar.

If you were an epidemiologist, it was a screaming red alert. Because the Infection Mortality Rate (IMR) was 9.5%. Of the 8,096 who got infected, 774 died.

By comparison, the IMR for SARS-CoV-2, or Covid-19, is just over 1%.