Peter van Buren In the 1980’s, agenda-driven panic around the HIV epidemic set back the public health response by years… Nothing is more viral than fear. Fear – fight or flight – is a terrible way to make decisions that call for time, science, and rational thinking. Want to screw up a public health crisis? Let fear drive. Democrats, Pavlovian conditioned by years of believing everything Trump does is “an existential threat,” are about twice as likely as Republicans to say the coronavirus poses an imminent danger. Make a joke of it—pandemic or…
