Thursday, December 09, 2021

Trust in Time

 

One constant during this pandemic is the recurring fear, confusion and controversy as each surge and/or new variant appears. Accordingly, you can almost take your pick of which news stories to believe — either Omicron is a serious threat or it’s not; the vaccines offer good long-term protection or they don’t; and the worst is over or the worst is yet to come.

The whole mutating mess is a litmus test of whether you are an optimist or a pessimist by nature or experience, as well as how much you feel you can trust media reports about these matters.

An additional issue in the age of the Internet, of course, is you can find whatever point of view you wish to embrace out there is the wilds of social media and the endless parade of websites catering to fringe audiences.

For my part, I try to scan as many legitimate media sources as possible, focusing on those that have proven to be reliable in the past, or whose internal fact-checking methodologies I’m familiar enough with to trust that they will usually get things right.

But when it comes to the behavior of the coronavirus and the mRNA vaccines devised to fight it, both topics are still too new and uncertain for anyone to make confident long-term predictions about their impacts. That’s the bottom line.

That brings it all down to trust — trust in the public health officials, scientists, and vaccine manufacturers — as well as in the media to get the story straight and accurate. And trust in all of those parties has been strained to the limit during this crisis. Especially trust of the media.

Restoring trust once it has been broken is a difficult process for anyone. Meanwhile, the variants will just keep coming, and the vaccines will just keep coming, so the mixed messages will just keep coming.

And I can do is to try my level best to parse them day by day as we continue this difficult journey together.

Thank you for reading my daily essays!

THURSDAY’S HEADLINES:

THURSDAY’s LYRICS:

"I Must Have Done Something Bad”

George Jones

I must have done something bad some time in my life

And I paid for it time and again

But this time you've hurt me so bad I could lay down and die

And the pain grows each day ten times ten times ten

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