Mastodawn

RE: https://mas.to/@therightarticle/116300144161152058

If ever there was proof of the damage done by neoliberalism, this is it! The second wave (which killed 87,000 people in UK) was driven almost entirely by Sunak’s “eat out to help out”, and Johnson’s defying the experts to ‘save Christmas’.
It is extraordinary that you can kill tens of thousands of people with your obsession with the economy, and yet face absolutely no consequences.
Mind you, that’s nothing compared to the death toll that climate inaction will produce.

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laen🪻Mar 28

@KimSJ
what gets me about all of this is that they're acting like covid is over and the damage is done. like the current government isn't killing thousands from covid every year. like the damage isn't cumulative and continuous. they're all complicit.

they're doing this, mind you, while having full ventilation and precautions in the enquiry itself.

they know. they all know and they don't care.

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Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷Mar 29

@moonrabbit
And of course it’s not just Covid. Flu and other respiratory infections damage health and productivity too.

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laen🪻Mar 29

@KimSJ
they do indeed. usually* less so on the long-term immune, neurological, vascular, and organ damage, but yes. and as covid makes everyone more susceptible to those other infections, you'd really think that they'd make more of an effort to encourage people to protect themselves and others. they (rightly!) don't let people drive drunk, and covid is so very, very much worse than that in terms of how many people one person can kill.

but but but the economy. which will collapse eventually when everyone's too sick to work and too poor to buy stuff.

bah.

*ofc debilitating post-viral illness can come on after any infection, but covid has the added benefit of being not so much a respiratory illness but a vascular one. with proteins that lodge in the brain ...

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C++ Wage Slave

@moonrabbit @KimSJ

If the economy collapses in the future, that's some other government's problem. If you tell people not to go to the pub, that's your problem here and now, and you won't get voted back in. So short-termism wins every time, even at the cost of people's lives and health.