Democrats Are Infected by a Virus, but It’s Not COVID — It’s Fear

A whopping 71% of Democrats believe everyone should still stay at home out of fear of COVID

U.S. coronavirus cases and deaths are rapidly fading. The majority of American adults have now been vaccinated against COVID-19. Yet despite all this cause for optimism, another malady continues to plague too many Americans: unjustified fear and hysteria.

At the surface level, new Gallup polling shows a public ready to move on. As of May 1, 56 percent of Americans say that healthy people should “live their normal lives as much as possible and avoid interruptions to work and business.” Just 44 percent of respondents said that healthy people should still “stay at home as much as possible to avoid contracting or spreading the coronavirus.”

Unfortunately, the poll’s reasonable findings were not equally distributed among parties. Only 29 percent of Democrats said healthy people should try to resume normal life. A whopping 71 percent still believe that Americans ought to stay home out of fear of COVID-19. And only 2 percent of Democrats said their lives are “completely back to normal.” While some Republicans and independents share these views, the numbers are much smaller.

This polling reveals that a significant subset of Americans continues to hold back from normal life due to a hysterical degree of fear that, at this stage in the pandemic, has little basis in reality.

After all, the COVID-19 vaccines are incredibly effective. According to Stat News, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are roughly 95 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 infection, while the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is roughly 70 percent effective on the same measure. What’s more, the vaccines are even more effective at preventing severe illness and death.

Basically, the vaccinated have nothing to fear from COVID-19. According to LA County public health officials, “only 0.00036% of fully vaccinated people went on to die from the virus.” So there’s absolutely no fact-based reason why fully vaccinated adults should continue living in fear and hiding in their homes.

That so many Democrats report experiencing objectively unjustifiable levels of fear and paranoia suggests they’ve been taken in by fearmongering and alarmism—of which we’ve certainly had no shortage.study by researchers from Dartmouth and Brown found that U.S. media coverage had a disproportionately negative skew relative to the actual state of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially compared to international and scientific coverage.

“The negativity of the U.S. major media is notable even in areas with positive scientific developments including school re-openings and vaccine trials,” the study concluded. “Stories of increasing COVID-19 cases outnumber stories of decreasing cases by a factor of 5.5 even during periods when new cases are declining.”

And it’s widely documented that Democrats are more likely to consume and place trust in traditional mainstream media outlets, which could be one reason they’ve fallen prey to disproportionate alarmism.

Similarly, the tone and messaging of public health bureaucrats could be behind the distorted perception many Democratic voters hold. For example, CDC Director Rochelle Wolensky went viral in late March after getting emotional at a White House coronavirus press briefing where she admitted how “scared” she was of the pandemic’s trajectory, citing a sense of “impending doom.” Suffice it to say, things have only improved since these dramatic remarks, with the CDC itself loosening its mask and distancing recommendations a couple of months after Wolensky’s alarmist comments.

Here, too, we might find some explanation for the partisan divide over doom: Democrats tend to put more faith in government officials like Wolensky, particularly now that President Biden is in office.

Of course, critics might counter that being overcautious can’t hurt. Better safe than sorry, right?

Well, no. In real life, there’s no escaping trade-offs, and good decision making requires a rational weighing of costs and benefits. Irrational fear makes this impossible. In his hit work Dune, acclaimed sci-fi author Frank Herbert wrote that “fear is the mind killer.” He dubbed fear “the little death that brings total obliteration.” What he meant was that fear clouds our ability to make rational decisions, which, if unchecked, ultimately leads to our downfall.

And in the case of the pandemic, excessive caution has had real and devastating consequences. School closures, for example, were initially understandable when the pandemic first broke out. But out of an “abundance of caution,” they ended up stretching many months after we learned that children were at little risk from COVID-19 and that schools weren’t transmission hotspots. This has created enormous education gapsparticularly for special needs and otherwise disadvantaged children, that will lead to lower lifetime earnings—to say nothing of the mental and social its taken on our children. Doctors across the globe have warned that they have witnessed an “international epidemic” of child mental health crises, including suicide attempts.

It’s clear that over caution can be deadly, too.

It’s understandable, if nonetheless concerning, that so many Americans remain plagued by the mental virus that is hysterical fear. But only by overcoming our fear can we reassert ourselves as rational actors and reclaim our agency.

Too many Americans, particularly Democrats, still need to make this transformation. Only then can they finally move on from the pandemic by reclaiming their connection to reality.

Source: Newsweek

6 Comments
  1. ken says

    “After all, the COVID-19 vaccines are incredibly effective. According to Stat News, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are roughly 95 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 infection, while the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is roughly 70 percent effective on the same measure.”

    From Broward Medical :
    We do not know whether the vaccine will prevent infection and protect against onward transmission. Immunity persists for several months, but the full duration is not yet known. These important questions are being studied.

    Note: they say “We do not know whether the vaccine will prevent infection and protect against onward transmission”

    But then say “but the full duration is not yet known. “

    Now there’s double speak if I ever saw it.

    Here’s the fact…. It’s experimental,,, they don’t know doo doo.

    Then we have:
    “The FDA has authorized three COVID-19 vaccines which have been shown to be safe and effective as determined by data from the manufacturers and findings from large clinical trials. This data demonstrates that the known and potential benefits of this vaccine outweigh the known and potential harms of becoming infected with COVID 19.”

    Not: they don’t say it’s ‘approved’, only authorized,,, they don’t mention it’s experimental and they bs you about the effectiveness rate which the manufactures scammed. Do you honestly think these same smiling doctors care about you!

    They say their safe and effective when thousands have died and even more with serious side effects. Outright lying!

    These people are evil. The disease is relabeled flu which they say has disappeared. Every time they open their mouths they spew lies. They have lied so much, scammed so much data that it will be next to impossible for anyone in the future to figure it out.

    Check out the fine people concerned for us in the picture.

    As for the injection,,, be informed and choose wisely.

    https://www.browardmedicalurgentcare.com/covid-19-vaccine/

    1. Art says

      Ken I know you were implore folks to subscribe. I already subscribe to my local rag to get more or less the same news. Lies and propaganda are frustrating since they’re so damn apparent.

  2. tunamelt says

     “A whopping 71 percent still believe that Americans ought to stay home out of fear of COVID-19″

    They are cowards plain and simple. Pathetic. Life has always been short and filled with risk. Life is a gift from God. Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero.

  3. Helga Weber says

    All the plandemic fears

  4. John says

    Utter garbage. Fabricated, conflated nonsense. Anti-empire is spreading more lies since the last time I bothered to visit. Still utterly worthless.

  5. Stacy Fiske says

    The one thing I don’t like about this piece is it assumes this 100k sample of Americans is in fact ALL Americans. It’s a representative sample… that is weighted if their selected people don’t respond or if the randomly selected group is too heavy in any certain sect. I just can’t believe that 71% of Democrats believe we should all still be staying home. That just doesn’t pass the smell check. If half of Democrats are young people (people under 50) a lot of them mostly work as essential workers that can’t stay home, nor can they afford to stay home. A majority of R’s and HALF of D’s are over 50, it seems these numbers in this poll are skewed of course, because they all are. But the premise being D’s are so scared because of their media is a little bit hypocritical when the R’s are terrified of losing their white privilege and their media is beating the drum along with that too. The media is definitely the main source of this fear, and BOTH affiliated people are old folks that get their info from their trusted news organizations on TV that are run by corporate cronies and fully use propaganda to put their viewers in fear causing the ridiculous craze we see everyone in now. I just don’t agree with this “one side is stupid” tilt.

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