Fox news and Donald Trumps statements on corona virus and Ebola virus
One commonality between mass shooting and the COVID pandemic seems to be that conservatives have come to a large agreement among themselves that there is a certain number of deaths that are an acceptable price to pay to let them continue doing whatever they want to do. Sure, some individual conservatives who end up amongst the group of people who end up actually paying that price might flip, and realize this is a bad idea, but look at the numbers. Despite the large numbers of people killed both by mass shootings and the pandemic, in terms of probabilities, they feel most of them will never be directly affected by them. So the number of conservatives who flip due to their own personal experiences is just a small fraction of the whole conservative population, not nearly enough to significantly affect the overall course of their beliefs.
COVID: widespread pandemic. Admitting it’s serious implies admitting we have a civic duty to others in society.
Ebola: Not a pandemic. Precisely 0.000001% of Americans ever saw an Ebola patient with active symptoms. No civic duty to others in society is implied, so conservatives don’t need to deny its existence.
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