Q Toon: Cough, and the World Coughs with You

When the news was reporting that China had completely closed off the city of Wuhan because of some newfangled virus, I wondered what would happen in this country if such a thing ever got out of control here.

When it did get out of control here, I thought everyone would recognize what the Chinese had to go through, so health officials would take charge and everyone would do what we could to avoid having to quarantine entire cities. Surely we would have had this thing under control by sometime in the summer if we all pulled together.

But we have a president who thought he could make the virus magically disappear by Easter or Mother's Day or Independence Day just by wishing it so. After all, he has always had enablers on retainer so that he could wish away his school records, his creditors, his bankruptcies, his porn dates, and his impeachable offenses.

We also have an excess of Cliff Clavenesque antivaxxers, QAnoncompoops, conspiracy fabulists, and Dr. Stella Immanuels, and legions of right-wingers screeching that pulling together is just socialism by another name. The religious right has demanded that its faith-based pseudoscience — creationism, for example — is equally valid as empirical science, and even that it be taught in schools. Flat Earthers are scarcely any more ridiculous.

The lot of them have combined to keep this pandemic spreading like wildfire.

It's almost like it's a conspiracy or something.