Conservative Playlist Over a few weeks of March 2020, the collective consciousness of Western nations moved from curiosity about the new virus in China to serious worry, then to communal fear, and finally to total panic. This highly contagious and self-reinforcing terror ā passed back and forth, with no subsequent immunity, among political leaders, various types of scientific experts, the media, and much of the populace ā is the most obvious explanation of the hasty enactment of unprecedentedly extreme measures that were supposed to control what fearful thoughts had turned into a threat to civilisation.
The field on which these panic-weeds grew has been well-prepared. The soil was turned over by a half-scientific cult which had recruited Bill Gates, probably the largest non-governmental funder of public health research and initiatives.
The ground was fertilised by the popular culture, including a TED talk by Gates and the filmĀ Contagion. Irrigation was provided by research into using viruses as biological weapons (technically into countering such use by understanding how it could be done). This war-thinking probably encouraged some public health professionals to both fear the worst and countenance society-damaging interventions that the World Health Organisation and all national authorities explicitly recommended against…
