Hey, I think it’s time for a little bit of shame for some of those most responsible for so much unnecessary sickness, misery, disability, and death.
I don’t know enough to truly comment on my nomination for #1, but I think WHO’s Michael Ryan, who slipped the note to the director general prompting him to walk back the declaration that COVID was airborne.
CDC’s Wallensky did a lot of damage with her scarlet letter nonsense Re masks, and truly just sucked as a human, but I think Ashish Jha really wins for pure cynical opportunism during this whole thing. Barely ever a mask in sight. Only cursory nods to filtration, or really any interventions beyond an initial course of vaccines, and even that was halfhearted. So maybe #3 and #2 respectively.
I know there’s always Trump with his hot bleach injection, but I feel like he’s way down on the list because fucking over human civilization was always just kind of his THING. Like, he didn’t fail us, he just performed as expected. Death, bigotry, and confusion are all par for the course for him.
I really don’t know where to fall on Biden, who is shockingly disappointing. But I’m tossing him as ~#4 because there is other shit going on - like, balancing this with not slipping into fascism is something I’m not sure I know the perfect answer for. But for the others, who are failing the hardest at their single core mission of MAYBE FUCKING DO SOME PUBLIC HEALTH, YOU FUCKERS, just ugh.
Ok, one last thing - I think some people deserve to rank a bit just because of how successfully they turned relatively small platforms into THOUSANDS of personally attributable deaths due to misinformation.
My own mayor is one of those, who would’ve gladly tossed us into the tidal basin for 3 extra tourists and a head pat from anyone who matters nationally. There’s that dude who likes to try the Malcolm Gladwell schtick, but even dumber, on COVID, and pressured his wife into long COVID on a plane - he seems like a real piece of shit. Can’t think of his name. Monica Gandhi and Leana Wen really managed to spin some (wrong) truisms into tons of media appearances and column inches. Then there are the ones with initial promise who fucked us in the end, like Fauci. And every ID physician who doesn’t wear a respirator as a matter of course, there’s a pretty special place for you, though that’s really a team effort.
Anyway, who really deserves top 10 in the shame-until-the-end-of-time list?
#CovidIsNotOver #COVIDisAirborne #covid #AshishJhaSucks and finally #TeamOrca for good measure
Not going to lie, I woke up still mad at Jha today. I honestly don't know him and his story well enough to figure out if he just lives in a bubble or if he's just straight up dishonest. Yesterday I already got a "the President and the COVID czar said it's over. What more could you possibly want?"
Yes, all of the things he talked about that schools supposedly had previously were true for HIS kids, but definitely not for mine. So is his latest op-ed all true in his world?
For all of the absurdity he did slip in "For now, there is no foolproof way of avoiding long COVID short of avoiding infections altogether" to his op-ed, which I've been pointing out to anyone who read the headline and tried to tell me it's more "proof" that it's over.
