When political concerns rule the facts. . .

Whether you remember the politics of AIDS or the politics of Covid or the politics evolving with monkey pox, it is not necessarily about the facts or about the science.  Politics have had an inordinate influence over how the medical community and the government respond to urgent health issues.  While some think that this is correct, others decry how the panic is changed by the omission of some facts.  

Everyone knew that the AIDS crisis was a manageable crisis because it was well known how the disease was transmitted and the vulnerable population but everyone also knew that the powers that be had decided that this would not become the gay disease.  Everyone knows now that monkey pox is transmitted similarly and among the same population as AIDS but, as in the 1980s and 1990s, politics is affecting how this disease is portrayed and how we respond to it.  As it was then, the powers that be are working to make sure that this does not become a new gay disease.  All of this means that we cannot trust the headlines nor can we even trust those whose jobs are to manage the response of the medical community and government to such threats.  We thought we learned this after AIDS but apparently we have not.

The truth of Covid is that the vulnerable population was never children or youth or healthy individuals but those with comorbidities -- a term that has now entered all our vocabularies.  Those in charge knew this all along but instead portrayed Covid as an equal threat to everyone.  It was not but neither was it going to be a disease of those with compromised health situations.  In the aftermath of the bigger part of the pandemic, we learned that certain treatments harmed recovery, that masks were never what they were cracked up to be, and that no vaccine really prevented anyone from getting the disease.  Political concerns shaped what was said and how it was said to the general population -- by all sides, I might add.  While the cry is to listen to the science, those in charge of the science had political considerations and viewpoints that colored the response to the pandemic, to the vaccines, and to the national fear.  

The end result of failing to admit the limitations of science, especially early on in a health crisis, or of failing to be honest with the population has left us with an even bigger crisis than AIDS, Covid, or monkey pox.  We do not believe anyone anymore.  Some do not believe the science and others do not believe the medical community and nearly everyone distrusts the government.  So, in our failed efforts to be political with things that are facts we are left with a general population that has long ago tuned out of the news, turned away from medical authorities, and stopped listening to the government at all.  None of these are good and all of these will come back to haunt us down the road.

Those in government and medicine and the news have a solemn responsibility not to manipulate their script for political purpose and yet that is the betrayal that has crippled all of those institutions.  Worse, we are left only with the truth we deem to be true -- a truth only as deep and wide as one individual.  The skepticism that has erupted against such manipulations has spread -- sometimes rightfully and sometimes wrongly -- to nearly every institution in our society (even the Church!).  Such is the heavy burden that rests on government, medicine, the media, and religion.  The worst outcome is not that people will not believe you but that they will not believe anyone anymore.