Viruset
går att utrota, definitely, even in its recent and extremely contagious form, BA.5. It has been shown again and again, most recently in Shanghai, but it requires a huge effort and is no doubt very expensive. But there is no real will to do so in most (all?) of the Western world.
Notice this from your
Nature article:
In January, Nature asked more than 100 immunologists, infectious-disease researchers and virologists working on the coronavirus whether it could be eradicated. Almost 90% of respondents think that the coronavirus will become endemic
I also think that the virus
will become endemic, but not because it
can't be eradicated. Notice also that the article is from Feb 2021, before BA.5, before Omicron and even before Delta!
That SARS-CoV-2
will not be eradicated in no way means that it
cannot be eradicated. It means that politicians and the captains of industry don't want to use the resources needed to eradicate it because they think it's cheaper to make people believe that they can 'learn to live with the virus'. Which, by the way, is how we got to Delta, Omicron and BA.5.
And, yes, we disagree about Cuba, economy (I imagine), NATO (I imagine), and nuclear power.
As far as Cuba is concerned, I don't blame people in Western countries for having the opinions about the country that they do. They believe what they have been told by the media, fairly consistently. So did I before I got to know and read up on it. However, I do blame people who pretend to know about Cuba based merely on the impression they got from the Western media, which is as reliable in its reporting about Cuba as the Swedish media has been in its reporting about the pandemic.
In the USA, you can make a living making up lies about Cuba. And you can make an even better living by making up lies about Cuba while living in Cuba!
I wrote a short post about our so-called
representative democracy with a few quotes from the reality of this kind of regime about how it separates people from the power to make decisions: https://forum.vof.se/viewtopic.php?p=746658#p746658
And yesterday, in the context of a discussion about Dawkins turning racist and Danish Jyllands-Posten's Muhammad cartoons, I wrote an even shorter post about the theme of
rights: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=13842312#post13842312
You know as well as I do that we had no say whatsoever in the decisions made about the pandemic response of our respective countries, for instance.
In Cuba, they have what they themselves call
participatory democracy, which may be the main reason why Cubans trust its vaccines and don't imagine that the government or health authorities fill them with mind-control chips:
Cuba has opted for a system which seeks to keep people as involved as possible with the tasks of finding solutions, balancing need, allocating scarce resources and accommodating difference. Cuba is a country in constant negotiation with itself and its systems of participation facilitate those negotiations.
https://cuba-solidarity.org.uk/cubasi/article/187/all-in-this-together-cubarsquos-participatory-democracy
I am not asking you to believe me. I am asking you to read up on this before you make up your mind about what Cuba is. What it says on some Democracy Watch site (whatever) really isn't the same thing as making an effort to actually find out. The pandemic should have taught you that, too.
As a skeptic, I love the way that Cuban authorities
inform the population and teach young people about social media and the way to deal with the manipulation and lies running rampant there. They have a TV show,
Con Filo, dedicated to this, and you can bet your sweet *** that you will never stumble onto this on YouTube or Google, unless you search for it specifically, but it is there nevertheless: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5Pqox7d7Q2LpAagKq7dM2g (English subtitles optional)
By the way, Cuba really has to put in a tremendous effort to try to cleanse
'Cuba-bilden' from the worst lies and defamation; currently, for instance, that Cubans are forced to get vaccinated. Much like Shanghai was much more interesting during the lockdown than it is now, it just can't be
allowed to be true that there is a country where the whole population lines up willingly and eagerly to get the jabs. If they are better than us in this respect, it must be because they people were forced at gunpoint to get vaccinated. (By the way, I think this is a major difference between Cuba and China: The Chinese haven't been very eager to get immunized.)
But on the other hand, those lies (much like the lies about American diplomats in Havana being attacked with microwave weapons) make the majority of Cubans realize the absurdity of the propaganda aimed at the country.
This is also the reason why I do my utmost to
inform about Cuba, and in particular about Cuba's pandemic response, even though I am very much aware that this makes me seem unreliable in the eyes of some people. You know that I did the same thing when New Zealand was still doing a great job of it, and I would have continued to do so if its strategy hadn't changed.
I just don't give a **** If people can't handle the truth. So be it.
