One very serious problem that led to many others is that too many people either cannot read above a fourth year elementary level or are not trying.
People who might call themselves "creationists" or who believe the account of creation in Genesis should be taken literally are a problem because the Bible itself does not require a literal interpretation of most verses, if any. It is in fact mostly written far above a fourth year elementary level. Among the mistakes "creationists" make is to believe that the Bible claims a "fixity of species" in contradiction to Darwin's theory of evolution. Not only does the Bible not claim any fixity of species, it has the story of the modification of a gene pool, Laban's flocks tended by Jacob, in advance of Darwin. This should not be surprising since people had been breeding plants and animals for millennia before the Bible was compiled.
There is a reason the Bible must be above a fourth year elementary reading level. It deals with things that are not common experiences. In order to discuss anything "literally" it must be a common experience. For example the color green may be discussed "literally" between people who have all seen green. It is not possible however to discuss green "literally" with a person who has never seen it.
That however is only half the problem. Atheists also cannot read above a fourth year elementary level. They often ask, "If we are to believe in a god, which one?" Obviously if something is abstract and beyond the common senses, descriptions of it will vary the same way attempts to describe green to a person who has never seen it will vary.
Another ploy still used by atheists to dominate social media is to ask why if there is a god does evil flourish? That question has also been answered. A better question is, "Why do atheists expect the world to be a Garden of Eden?" The usual and somewhat Biblical answer to why this is not a Garden of Eden is because it is the "fallen world" where people have more choices but they have more responsibilities as well. In the Garden of Eden people never had to worry about being eaten by animals because the god there watched over all that. In the "fallen world" they might be like gods only in the sense of having to prevent animals from eating them using their own persuasions and devices. Ensuring the behavior of other people is also their problem in the fallen world, not any god's.
In their arguments with "creationists" atheists often suggest something the theory of evolution never did, that the origin of life itself can be explained by science. That of course was never taught in any schools as some, but not all, of them will admit.
Those are the two sides of the same bad coin, people who cannot read the Bible, but think they can, and people who do not understand science but think they do. Their "war" between "religion" and "science" neither of which they can possibly understand has driven the country very near bankruptcy. Politicians, as it very often turns out, are also neither theologians nor scientists. What they all have in common; many politicians, creationists, and atheists is remaining oblivious of anything beyond a fourth year elementary reading level. The increase in the national debt made necessary by the pandemic is a fraction of what the national debt already was without a pandemic, which should help to illustrate what an unnecessary problem it was and remains. More cannot be spent to help partly because too much has been spent already.
Each side has its own subjective world view neither of which is consistent with any compelling objective world view. That might be a more polite way of saying that they are "detached from reality." There are even less polite terms.
The reason Trump was elected in 2016 was that some people, enough people, assumed he would break the pattern in Washington and pay attention to more sensible theologians and scientists. The reason he lost in 2020 is that he was just more of the same problem only worse, the same bad coin again.
It is stunning that after the fiasco of the last four years there are still people who hope to make things right without any benefits from a high school education and are trying to bring Trump back. They won't even discuss overturning Kitzmiller v. Dover because they do not want to do that. They don't fear any god themselves and have no talent to help anyone else fear any god.
If the two sides of the same bad coin could read the writing on the wall they might become less nuisance, perhaps even learn higher reading skills. These articles are too long though. Some things have to be repeated in later articles because no one read the earlier ones. This article is mostly things on The Town Voice for many years.
The current health crisis is totally another matter. "Science" (the real one) has not been as persuasive as it hoped to be. Part of the reason is that for all their claims to "follow the science" there isn't much yet. Some reports still have mathematical errors. Most of the claims against "religion" before the pandemic were mistaken. Even Religious people know economies are currently dependent on finite fuels and major changes will one time be necessary. The part about the globe "warming" however is not based on science. It's based on misinformation and exaggeration that has backfired (Still, although requests for good science remain open here). Take a lesson and do not overstate your case. Beside the stunning ignorance of science obvious in many people so fond of science is their stunning ignorance of morality. Yet most truly religious people, being more cautious in many things than average, have complied with hygiene guidelines. They already knew before that the most effective tool against communicable disease is hygiene, not vaccines, although they might welcome a really good vaccine if someone who is not obviously stupid tried to sell it. One good job the real science is doing is trying to explain to people that the vaccine does not prevent a person from carrying the virus despite being asymptomatic. Some people are expecting too much too soon from vaccines because they have a childish blind faith in science. That of course was a problem before when they tried to impose their imperfect solutions on "anti-vaxxers" who were lucky enough to already have an answer. Of course vaccines may be important for people whose work environment requires high volumes of poorly disciplined public traffic and religious people have never been "anti" such vaccination.
Please pardon the repetition, but no conspicuous news organization is even hinting at these obvious truths. In order to be "profitable" a news organization has to pander to one side or the other of the bad coin. The "mainstream" media pander to the atheists who believe religion and the Republican Party are the problem. The "conservative" media pander to those who think any widely accepted notions, government or otherwise, will always be a problem. There is no money to be made calling a pox on both their camps. It was remarkable when Twitter banned Trump because no one should have been getting their facts from Twitter anyway. It is another proof of the bad coin that anyone thought Twitter was a responsible news source or even tried to be one ever before.
A problem likely to persist with social media is that it is dominated by the middle of the intelligence bell curve where "most people" are. It can be shown that the people in the middle of the curve cannot distinguish the people on the right edge of the curve (highly intelligent) from the people on the left edge (as measured by people with a compelling objective world views). That is, they cannot distinguish an idiot from a genius. They cannot distinguish Trump or his followers from people who actually benefited from science education. One advantage social media once had is that they gave a voice to people who had no where else to go. Perhaps they should go back to that and give up trying to police knowledge they do not have themselves.
Some reminders of how bad things were include that Republicans believed Trump did not intimidate Ukraine, but Biden did -- while Democrats believed Trump intimidated Ukraine, but Biden did not. A flaw in the Democrat's narrative is that if so many people agreed the message should be delivered, why was Biden chosen to deliver it? Then too there is the Republican and Democratic attitudes toward the "private life" of Donald Trump and the "private life" of Bill Clinton. There are more examples where each side believes it should be allowed things for which the other side should be punished.
A problem with many "Christians" is that they too often believe that if they do it, then it's okay, but if anyone else does it, then it must be punished. They also believe that their sins are "forgiven" although that probably means only their debt to a god a cleared, while they still have debts to the people on Earth they harmed by their sins. They also sometimes mention they should not fear, although Proverbs 9:10 says fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It can appear that Christianity was deliberately designed to focus on membership above everything else. Perhaps that is to give people born without any sensible traditions a place to go where they can be exposed to sound traditions.
A peculiar report still found (at the time of this writing, perhaps not when later articles are ready) on television is that a vaccine can be "100 percent" effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths. It is no simple matter to establish any such fact.
One problem is that so many people are going to die anyway without the virus. When there are multiple medical conditions how is it possible to know how much of the cause was any one condition?
Among methods to find out there is a statistical one, but because of the numbers with the virus it is no help. For simplicity just deal with deaths and assume the death rate is one percent in a similar year without the virus. The actual number is close to that. For simplicity assume the death rate from the virus is 0.0016 percent. According to the highest counts out there it is close, although it too might include people who died of complicating multiple conditions.
Now consider what "percent effective" means. That number is found by administering the vaccine to a large group, assume 1000 people. Another group of 1000 people who receive no vaccine is tallied as well. The terminology "85 percent effective" means that if 'x' is the number of people in the group with no vaccine who get the virus, the the number of people who get the virus in the group who did get the vaccine is found to be 'x' times 15 percent, or 85 percent less.
Now assume the following. In the group of people who receive no vaccine 11 people die, likely 10 of those would have died anyway, the other 1 perhaps from the virus. Of the 1000 who received the vaccine only 10 people die. Since "likely" 10 would have died anyway that leaves zero deaths from the virus, so there is the "100 percent" figure often seen in reports.
Why that fails is that statistics are ordinarily not even nearly so precise. A "sample" or "survey" is mathematically very different from counting the whole population. Assuming a population is "known" to be 320 million and the number of deaths is "known" to be 3,200 that means a death rate of one percent. Then in a "sample" of 1000 people the "probability" is that 10 will die. In actual practice some samples might have only 5 deaths and some samples might have 15 deaths or various other numbers. If anyone tells you they are getting the same number in each sample, they are lying, stupid, or both. The problem is similar to measuring the temperature of the planet to within 2 degrees. The incapacity to distinguish statistical analysis from science ceteris paribus is a problem exacerbated by belligerent atheism. Most medical practice is far from science ceteris paribus.
Political polls can be far more accurate than other surveys because there are so few complicating factors. Even those however have a significant margin of error, as sometimes proved. In order to claim to be "100 percent" effective against hospitalization and death requires a margin of error of far less than one percent since the data being compared are about one percent or two percent. Even if the a larger, less error prone sample size approaches the number of people in the whole population, getting an error far less that one percent is still not possible.
Grant then that some reports about the success of the vaccine are not to be believed. Since it is possible for hygiene in many life circumstances to be 100 percent effective it makes no sense to mandate that those people receive a vaccine or even attend a site where the vaccine is being administered.
Yet there will probably be efforts to mandate the vaccine for some time to follow because mentally deficient atheists (on that side of the bad coin) have a childish blind faith in science and expect a simple, one-size-fits-all solution. The military might mandate the vaccine since they might not be the paragons cleanliness in the posters. It is probably wise for anyone in such an unstable work environment to get a vaccine where one is offered by good science. Sometimes, much of the military can be the sort of people who need simple rules to follow without understanding or questioning any of the math or science.
Angry people who want to mandate vaccines should be careful about getting into any fights or playing dirty. The people they bother can be far more intelligent and might and fight back.
In a better world with better leaders, blindly following rules can be a good and very efficient thing. There actually are better leaders in science on the way. They are needed as is assistance finding them, and sorry, social media has not been much help so far.
The probabilities used here are intended to show that it is not possible to use statistical methods to prove "100 percent" reduction in death or hospitalization rates as announced by Johnson & Johnson. Among the many problems are that there likely would be rather numerous deaths (for example or hospitalizations for another example) where there is some other condition present in addition to covid-19.
The number of deaths for example where there are multiple causes is not found using these probabilities. For one thing these probabilities are not independent. For another thing it is the probability of the presence of covid that is needed not the probability of death from covid.
Estimating the number of deaths from multiple causes therefore requires a different approach. If the likelihood of dying is 1 percent and the likelihood of dying from covid-19 is .01 percent (rough estimates for these examples) and if those probabilities were independent then only 50 people in 5 million would die from multiple causes where one of the causes is covid-19, which is ridiculous.
To find the number of people who died from multiple causes who at least "had" covid-19 it is necessary to use the "testing positivity rate" of covid-19. That ranges from roughly 5 to 15 percent in current conditions.
Then, even using the optimal 5 percent probability of that under current conditions, there would be 250,000 people in 5 million "with" covid. If one percent of them died because they would have anyway that means 2,500 people would die with multiple conditions one of which is covid-19. Again though, these probailities are also not necessarily independent. The group who contracts covid might (perhaps logically) have a higher probability than the base rate of dying from other causes. That means more, and likely far more, than 2,500 people in each 5 million would die with multiple conditions including the presence of covid-19.