Biden has already warned the US is “facing a very dark winter” and that even with Pfizer’s announcement that it has a vaccine it believes is 90% effective, 200,000 more lives could be lost in the US in the next few months.
In 1982 Tom Siemer, who’d in Columbus Ohio worked at Rockwell International helping to design weapons like the OV-10 counterinsurgency aircraft, parts of the MX missile, B-1 bomber, and similar, used to ask people if they knew US military personnel had raped tens of thousands of Japanese women and young girls in the summer of 1945. Those hearing would react aghast, disbelieving. How could Americans do such a thing?! That would never happen. He’d then tell his audience that actually that was wrong, that the women and children hadn’t been raped, they’d been incinerated, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People were relieved: Oh, that. Yes, we knew about Hiroshima. So they’d been burned to death or crushed by collapsing buildings, not raped. That’s alright then.
How would readers react if 200,000 lives were not „lost“, if instead the story was that wealthy oligarchs tortured middle-aged women, young men, grandmothers and grandfathers to death? If the article read that Jeff Bezos laughingly filled teenage lungs with fluid to watch kids choke to death while he enjoyed upgrading his existing gold bathroom fixtures to platinum?
Experts say cases could rise exponentially in the coming weeks. Michael Osterholm, director of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a member of Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, told CNN daily cases could soon double.
“We are watching cases increase substantially in this country far beyond, I think, what most people ever thought could happen,” he said, adding: “It will not surprise me if in the next weeks we see over 200,000 new cases a day.”
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On Tuesday, Osterholm told CBS a “perfect storm” was forming and that hospitals were “about to be overrun”.
This is not the result of government policy serving economic interests, because of the relative power exerted by different economic classes. People are dying, and will continue to die in great numbers, because of natural forces, because of a storm. No one can do anything about the weather.
