By Dr Jason Hannan, PhD, University of Winnipeg — The Conversation, 4 May 2022
After two years of acknowledging the dangers of COVID-19, something eerily similar to the Republican Party’s embrace of election denialism has happened with public health policy across the western world. Federal and municipal governments in North America, Europe and Australia have begun lifting basic protections like vaccine and mask mandates, winding down public testing, ending contact tracing and withholding critical public health data. Pandemic management has been transformed from a public health problem to an individual one, with the slogan “Assess your own risk.”
Western politicians and public health officials have managed to craft a fictional universe in which we have reached endemicity, where infection is now “mild” and getting “milder” by the variant, where COVID-19 is “like the flu” and where voluntary vaccination alone is our ticket out of the pandemic. But not only are we nowhere near endemicity, the glib talk of mild infection overlooks COVID-19’s frightening vascular and neurological effects. Those infected are at increased risk of serious heart complications, including inflammation, acute coronary artery disease and cardiac arrest. According to one recent meta-analysis, 43% of COVID-19 survivors experienced symptoms of long COVID. For a supposedly mild disease, COVID-19 notably led to hospital collapse in both the United Kingdom and Canada in April 2022.
COVID-19 gaslighting erodes trust in government and public health, as well as institutions that follow their cue. It undermines the public authority of medicine and biomedical science to guide us through the pandemic. Just as climate change has been subjected to “bothsidesism,” we now increasingly hear about “both sides” of COVID-19. Most tragically, COVID-19 gaslighting erodes our trust in each other. It feeds mutual suspicion, paranoia, hostility and division. When infection risk is intrinsically social, the promotion of noxious concepts like “individual choice” and “assessing your own risk” only encourages us to blame each other in the event of an outbreak. Extremism is the only possible beneficiary of this erosion of public trust. This article has been republished under Creative Commons licence.