The owners of fear
Cartoon of 11/04/2021 in CTXT
They are the ones who dispatch fear every day. One day they can be giving generous space in their media to any conspiratorial anti-vaccine denialist moron and publishing terrors at the drop of a hat, and the next day recommending vaccination. The same thing they reproduce absurd anti-science discourses that pretend at the same time to give lessons in civic-mindedness and responsibility.
I remain convinced that the press is going through its worst period. It is not that I do not want it to take into account information that is supposedly discordant with what we believe or want to believe on any issue. That is not the point.
There are millions of miles between the practice of journalism and what is being done now. What should be information arrives with a whole host of opinions, each one crazier and more extreme, and the reader has already assumed that it cannot be otherwise.
It is true that the situation does not help much either, the unreasonable back-and-forth in the continuous back-and-forth to set the vaccination age for AstraZeneca without unifying scientific criteria and above all without trying to go into depth to inform with rigour the reasons for each decision have fed even more the obtuse denialists who in their delusions believe they are in possession of "hidden truths".
It is the same with the absurdity of the regulation of the use of the mask in any place and circumstance even if there is no other human being within a radius of ten kilometres, which seemed to be just a move to prevent people from clinging on to the the law of the metre and a half distance not to wear it and not to argue with the police when they were fined for not wearing it.
Screw-ups, lots of them, people taken by the pandemic, too many. The management of old people's homes and the protection of healthcare workers at the start of the pandemic was criminal and shameful. Not to mention the after-effects on our mental health and the ruin it has left us with, which we have added to the previous ones and which we will drag along until we are linked to the next ones.
All in all, in spite of the shoddiness of this one new normal and the fact that we are in the umpteenth stage of stupidity that we can talk about vaccines today reminds me of the suffocating and hopeless days of just a year ago when we had no treatment for the disease and nobody was betting a penny on having vaccines before four or five years from now.
