A public communications expert critiques the public health communication during the pandemic – and finds it to have been a total failure, and along the way, destroying trust and credibility in public health. The long-term consequence is few believe public health, with good reasons. This is not how it should have been done.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
Western state Governors are increasingly blaming climate change for western wild fires, as if the wild fires are a single variable. If only we could control the climate, we would no longer have wild land fires. Realistically, there is no magic control knob on climate that we can control and which will reduce fire danger for decades to come.
There are concrete steps that can be taken immediately to reduce the threats of future wild fires – but politicians would rather blame climate change – which they do not control – because to acknowledge there are factors which they can control is to acknowledge that their leadership has failed.
A common mistake people make is to focus on a single variable in a multiple variable problem. In this case, the focus is on one variable that cannot be controlled in the near term, while ignoring other variables that can be controlled.
Oregon’s Office of Emergency Management has a reputation for making things up. Yesterday, they claimed that 500,000 or 10% of Oregon’s population had evacuated due to wildfires. This claim received national and international media coverage. The Oregonian noted no where near that many people live in the evacuation zones. This afternoon, they have acknowledged its closer to 40,000, not 500,000. See how Internet memes get generated by fake data from official government sources?
Like duh! “…in an era of heightened sensitivity about disinformation campaigns carried out by foreign nations, bad-faith actors with far fewer resources can also manipulate public discourse and affect events in the real world.”
This claim comes out every year, from the same activist lobbying organization. They use misleading language and obfuscated definitions to imply a conclusion that is not true – a conclusion that the media laps up like good little puppies and uses to make false conclusions. This blog has covered this item twice previously. Nothing has changed.
Stories about people attending Covid parties and then getting sick are poorly sourced and in general, probably never happened.
Facebook had another oopsie, letting 5,000 app developers continue to have access to user data they should not have had access to.
In the midst of an ineptly managed pandemic and ineptly managed civil unrest and economic fiasco people try to make sense of it by reading everything they can. Scrolling through post and news story after news story is called “doomscrolling” and it destroys your mental health. Sadly, much of the bull shit is not from random social media posts but from actual experts who spew nonsense.
On April 29th, The Atlantic published an article by writer Amanda Mull, titled: “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice: The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.” What happened: Deaths fell. By a lot.