Jeffrey Tucker on how the coronavirus has "opened up a barrel full of toxic ideology"

It’s been extremely difficult in these times to think clearly as a professional medical service provider might. To them, this is a virus and the people who contract it need to be identified, isolated, and treated. Maybe that doesn’t sound complicated but sometimes the hardest thing is to think simply. It’s darn-near impossible when a perfect storm of media mania, political ambition, and public ignorance combined to open up a barrel full of toxic ideology that has poisoned people’s ability to be rational.

Even now, many people aren’t reading news or looking at data. They are confirming their biases. Our political culture has fully bled – a tsunami of blood – into one of the most essential tasks of civilization: caring for and curing the sick, and hence drowning rationality, science, and medical professionalism, and doing so at the expense of a billion lives.

Yes, that’s the tragic cost of an ideologically obsessed culture. Instead of defeating the virus, we are using its presence among us to defeat each other.

~ Jeffrey Tucker, "Coronavirus as Ideology," AIER.org, March 30, 2020