The Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski proposed the Law of the Infinite Cornucopia, stating that for anything people want to believe, there is no end of “proof” out there to support that belief.
Kolakowski proposed this decades before the internet existed, and later weaponized to create black holes of misinformation. Need proof the world is flat? It’s there on the internet. Need proof that COVID, rabies and other diseases are caused by vitamin deficiency? Done. There is a current epidemic of misinformation on vaccinations, much of it disseminated by regimes who do not wish America well. Cui bono? Russia, China, North Korea, Iran come to mind.
The internet can also provide information that humans have been dealing with epidemics for millennia, with smallpox reported as early as 10,000 BCE. The period known as the Second Pandemic lasted 400 years! From about 1330 until midway through the 18th century, killing hundreds of millions of people. More recently, between 50 and 100 million people died from the spread of the H1N1A virus (aka “Spanish flu,” from 1918 to 1920).
There have been pandemics in almost every decade since. Pandemics are the norm. There will be more, even deadlier.
Over centuries of human misery and suffering, scientists and doctors have developed vaccines that have helped reduce or eliminate smallpox, rabies, polio, influenza, malaria, shingles, chickenpox, diphtheria, anthrax, tuberculosis, pertussis, meningitis, measles, cholera, typhoid, scarlet fever, cholera, yellow fever, et al. And now COVID.