No one has right to claim COVID expertise

It is exasperating how anyone can claim to be on top of the COVID situation. No candidate running in the May 2022 elections for any position of authority over national policy has the right to criticize the ongoing government response to the pandemic or offer any credible response to any of the plague's numerous aspects, save perhaps only one --the provision of resources to fund response.

The person to put a finger on COVID has yet to be born. The country to lick the disease has yet to come forward. No formulation, method, or plan has emerged to clear a path going forward away from the virus. If the whole world is still in the thick of COVID, it is because the puzzle has remained unsolved.

And yet we see right now, without exception, every candidate having his or her say about the pandemic, either to criticize the government response or to promise a solution. All of them are lying. All of them are talking through their teeth. If they do not stop this folly, better take them to account ahead of time by rejecting them this early.

How can anyone pretend to know better than the government? If the government, with all the resources at its disposal, with all the lines of cooperation and communication with other countries open and functioning, can only manage to battle COVID the way it did, how can mere individual candidates with nothing to their names remotely resembling pandemic experience, claim to be any better.

No candidate, without exception, has the right to talk COVID. Period. The next time a candidate opens his or her mouth about COVID, pelt him or her with a cabbage. The only thing that can be promised with a fair degree of guaranteed expectation is a commitment to support any and all endeavors to continue, just like every other country in the world, this battle against a strange and mysterious deadly enemy.

The country has suffered a lot already. Our lives have been turned upside down. The economy is shot. Education is reduced to a ridiculous replica of its already usual low-ranking self. And the incredible thing is that we are not alone. Every country in the world has suffered just as we did, many even so much painfully worse.

And yet even more incredibly, there are still those among us, who differentiate themselves from the rest by looking at the world only through the eyes of politics, who think they are better when the rest of us are suffering worse, who think they know the answers when the universe is still waiting for the arrival of one.

Politicians pull your leg to promote themselves. They are worse than columnists and opinion makers who talk similarly smart but just the same are in no position to grow answers in a vacuum. At least, columnists and opinion makers, myself included, can always hide behind the fact that their self-righteousness is just all in the head. We content ourselves with comment. Our words you can take or leave unread or unheard.

But politicians submit themselves to an election, to be passed judgment upon based on what they promise to do or leave undone. We cannot ignore them because we are part of the process of leadership change. We have to deal with them whether we like it or not. The exasperating part is that while we can ignore columnists and opinion makers, we really have to deal with politicians, even suck up their COVID ignorance.