ohh Yama, "studying a recent US Supreme Court ruling".

really????. I support you but you got your researches wrong..

The more anti-vaxxers, or whatever they profess to be, the better.

This makes the line for getting the Covid vaccine shorter for old guys like me who will take the vaccine as soon as it is available.

Across the democratic world, many of our so called leaders have been unable to reconcile the personal freedom demanded by some of their citizens to refuse vaccination with the urgent and pressing social need to achieve a critical mass of vaccinated people and thereby achieve the elusive "herd immunity" to Covid 19.

Aided and abetted by misinformation and mischief making through various social media (such as false reports of fictional US Supreme Court decisions), this has resulted in inept, inconsistent and incompetent management of the pandemic. It is no exaggeration to say that hundreds of thousands of people have died as a direct consequence of this ineptitude.

The contrast with authoritarian regimes like that of China is striking. There, social needs always take precedence over personal freedom and the state has moved determinedly and forcefully to vaccinate the population. The results speak for themselves: a rapidly recovering economy and the resumption of a close to normal life.

The pandemic has exposed major flaws in the democratic models of governance in many countries, as well as the intellectual and philosophical bankruptcy of the prevailing neo-liberal economic model (as distinct from what we call capitalism). It also has revealed that far too many of those who find their way into positions of political leadership in the democratic world are alarmingly incapable of exerting effective leadership in a crisis.

Far too many have been blinded by ideology or, frankly, their lack of intellectual capacity. The latter has rendered them incapable of correctly understanding the situation, much less formulating an effective strategy to deal with it. Instead, their response is either a shrug of indifference or a series of panicky, ineffective, poorly thought efforts that sometimes even manage to make the situation worse. The President of Brazil is an exemplar of this class of politician.

It is very sad that Governor Yama appears to have succumbed to misinformation spread by libertarian activists in the USA, where the inability to reconcile social needs with often irrational notions of what personal freedom means has been especially acute and damaging.

Make no mistake, as the world staggers out of the worst of this pandemic (which may not yet have been reached), those of us living in the democratic world need to take a long, hard look at the political and institutional failures that have caused immense harm. Whether we are willing and able to do anything about them remains a moot point.

Meanwhile, China will emerge more rapidly and more strongly from this experience, thus helping consolidate the Chinese Communist Party's belief in the fundamental superiority of their authoritarian system. This will be yet another step on the road to the war that is clearly looming, just when democratic powers are at their most confused and weakest since World War 2.