I believe everybody is entitled to make their own decisions, but I also believe that the best decisions are based on facts and truth. Over the past eighteen-plus months, millions of people have made decisions based on lies and misguided rhetoric while millions of others have followed the truth. It appears there have been – and still are – essentially two sets of beliefs floating around, and only one set can be proven to be true and based on facts rather than opinions.

One of these sets of beliefs was pushed by dubious “experts” who appeared as regular guests on some cable “news” shows, Some of them even became accepted advisers at the federal government level. It should be noted that the information promoted by these so-called experts has been based primarily on opinions – their own opinions and these opinions have been wholeheartedly accepted by the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. Following is a list of several of those so-called expert guests and advisers: an OB/GYN, a medical news correspondent/family medicine doc/ER doc, TV celebrity cardiothoracic surgeon/journalist/pseudoscience promoter, a radiologist, a Cameroon-American physician who believes space alien DNA is used in medical treatments and that vaccines are being made to stop people from being religious and a prominent politician/neurosurgeon (in cahoots with my pillow guy).

In addition to this illustrious list, and with the absolute least amount of expertise but with the greatest number of believers/followers, are social media trolls who obviously failed high school science.

The other set of not just beliefs but facts is comprised of hundreds of real pandemic experts: heroes – scientists, medical experts, chemists, biologists – who have dedicated decades to scientific research and development in the areas of epidemiology, virology, infectious diseases, and immunology. Maybe some folks don’t heed these experts because they don’t know what those areas of study are??? Are these real experts placing too much responsibility on the public to heed their advice and stop the pandemic?

By the way, even though the specific vaccines for Covid 19 are fairly new, the research of coronaviruses, in general, has been going on for decades. (Did you think all those research scientists were just sitting on a beach somewhere waiting to be called in to solve a worldwide health problem?) It should be no surprise that with an extremely unprecedented concentration of work, specific effective vaccines were developed…. truly a feat accomplished by the best, the smartest, the most dedicated folks on the planet. Too bad way over one half million people had to die first. How many more have to die because of ignorant stubbornness? The shutdowns, the social distancing, the masks were working. New infections and deaths were decreasing dramatically. We were almost home-free. Almost.

Albert Einstein said, “Two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe.”

More to come….

Jeanne Schutz
Winona Lake