Doomiest Images of 2021
1 January 2022 (Desdemona Despair) – The year started with a fascist insurrection in the U.S. and ended with record COVID-19 case rates. In between, the forces of sedition and antiscience merged to form a monstrous alliance of violence, delusion, and ignorance amplified by social media and automation. The internet – once conceived as the most powerful tool of education in history – was fully weaponized into a menace that directly caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
In 2021, millions of humans fell under the influence of automated disinformation systems and refused the COVID-19 vaccines. This grim development was paradoxical on its face: how could people in the 21st century with access to the greatest information and education system in history reject one of the greatest medical interventions in history?
Moloch and the rise of the technogenic virus
Desdemona proposed an answer in the post, Moloch: first of the new technogenic viruses, which suggests that the existing disinformation platforms used by the antiscience and anti-vaccine movements have been hijacked by the molecular COVID-19 virus for its own defense, resulting in a hybrid, mixed-mode virus that evolves in both the biological and technological domains simultaneously. Des used the term “memetic vector” to describe the propagation of vaccine disinformation, and in a serendipitously related paper, epidemiologists Joshua M. Epstein, Erez Hatna, and Jennifer Crodelle used the phrase “endogenous contagious cognitive dynamics” to express a similar idea. This “technogenic virus” is a novel threat to humanity, and currently there are only minimal efforts to understand and combat it.
The fingerprint of Moloch emerged clearly in the U.S. and became visible in other nations where large-scale anti-vaccine protests and superspreader events occurred. In the U.S., antiscience and anti-vaccine delusions were embedded in the Republican party, and choosing to die alone in an ICU to “own the libs” became a required loyalty test. In Republican-controlled states, adults urged children to burn masks in public protests. By November 2021, a startling disparity in COVID-19 case rates between Red and Blue states was obvious.
For some people, delusion was shaken by the actual experience of the disease, but as the web site Sorry Antivaxxer documents, many sickened people who survived proved incapable of learning and clung more tightly to their delusions, scapegoating medical professionals and crediting horse dewormer and other quack remedies for their recoveries.
By November 2021, five million people had perished in the pandemic globally. The U.S. death toll crossed 800,000 in December. Writing in The Atlantic, Clint Smith observed:
“This week, the United States is passing a harrowing marker: 800,000 people killed by COVID—and that official number, as enormous as it is, is likely an undercount. One in every 100 Americans 65 and older has been killed by the virus. For nearly two years, we have all been surrounded by a marathon of death.
“Eight hundred thousand. It is a staggering number, with devastating reverberations for millions of people across this country. For perspective, each year in America some 38,000 people die in car crashes. Each year somewhere between 12,000 and 52,000 people die from flu. Each year 87,000 die from diabetes; 150,000 by stroke.
“More Americans have now been killed by COVID-19 than the number of people who died in the Civil War (750,000)—the deadliest war in American history and one in which more Americans died than during the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the Korean War, the Gulf War, the Iraq War, and the Afghan War combined.
“The number is so enormous that we risk becoming numb to its implications. […]
“When I think of 800,000 people, I think of the health-care workers who have watched death cascade around them. I think of how hard they work to save the lives of so many people diagnosed with the disease, and how hard it must be to watch them go. On 7 August 2020, Charles Henry Krebbs of Phoenix, Arizona, died of COVID at the age of 75. In a note his daughter Tara submitted to FacesofCOVID, she wrote, ‘I told him we loved him, that we knew that he had fought long and hard, and that it was okay for him go now. He wiggled his eyebrows at me. He knew I was there and that he was not alone. His ICU nurse stood by his side and cried with me as he passed away.'”
If healthcare workers had only the tsunami of COVID-19 patients to worry about, 2021 would have been disastrous enough. But the war on medical expertise escalated in 2021, as anti-vaxxers used increasingly violent rhetoric to harass and intimidate doctors and nurses working at vaccination sites.
Bringing the sedition and anti-vax caucuses together is Simone Gold, a Beverly Hills doctor who founded the antiscience group America’s Frontline Doctors and was arrested during the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. She was indicted for participating in the coup attempt but remains free on her own recognizance and tours the U.S., spreading disinformation about the pandemic. On 6 December 2021, members of her group stalked and confronted Kristina Lawson, the president of California’s medical board, which issues medical licenses and disciplines doctors.
In the final week of 2021, the CDC’s COVID Data Tracker reported another daily record in the U.S., with 486,000 new COVID-19 cases on 29 December 2021, beating the previous daily record set two days previously. The U.S. recorded at least 400,000 new cases of COVID-19 every day in the final week of December.
Also in the last days of 2021, the U.S. reported more than two million coronavirus cases in one week, breaking yet another record as the omicron variant spread across the nation. The 2.49 million COVID-19 cases in the last week of December exceeded the previous record of 1.7 million cases in the first week of January 2021.
Climate disasters
As coronavirus stalked humans, global warming disasters continued to wreak havoc around the world. One of the most alarming events was the heat dome that settled over northwest North America from 26 June 2021 to 6 July 2021. The resulting heatwave killed nearly 800 people in Washington state and British Columbia, making it the deadliest weather disaster in Canada’s history. The heatwave was estimated to have killed more than one billion marine animals.
The terrible summer of 2021 claimed many more casualties, as Siberia and California were hit once again by enormous wildfires. The entire town of Lytton, British Columbia was incinerated. Emergency workers contended with unprecedented wildfires and floods while attempting to fend off coronavirus infections; governments sheltered displaced disaster victims while trying not to exacerbate viral transmission.
Super Typhoon Rai struck the Philippines and caused destruction comparable to Super Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. On New Year’s Eve, more than 800,000 children required UN and ICRC assistance.
2021 was the year when global warming started visibly biting the developed world. No longer a phenomenon of developing nations, climate disasters struck deep in the heart of wealthy countries, with record rain triggering a deadly mudslide in the Japanese resort town of Atami, record floods killing hundreds in Germany, and the “worst rain in a thousand years” hitting China’s Henan province.
The human response to these escalating climate disasters was predictably anemic, with climate activist Greta Thunberg declaring the COP26 conference to be a failure:
“It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure. It should be obvious that we cannot solve the crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place. The COP has turned into a PR event, where leaders are giving beautiful speeches and announcing fancy commitments and targets, while behind the curtains governments of the Global North countries are still refusing to take any drastic climate action.”
It was worse than refusal to take action. Four days after COP26 concluded, the U.S. auctioned off more than 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico for fossil fuel extraction, the largest-ever sale of oil and gas drilling leases in the gulf.
It’s challenging to grasp the enormity of the ongoing global warming catastrophe. Graphs and photos alone aren’t enough – we need art to make the abstract threat tangible. Guerrilla artist Banksy has made several artistic statements on the imminent danger of abrupt climate change. In 2021, he auctioned a “vandalized” painting of Mount Rainier (Tahoma) from 1890 and renamed it Subject to Availability. It sold for more than $6 million.
- Don’t miss the doomiest graphs for 2021.
- For the doomiest content going back to 2010, check out the Doomiest Images and Graphs Index.
One Response
Comments are closed.