If We’re Going to Be Swimming Upstream in Debunking Coronavirus Nonsense, Let’s Be One Another’s Life Vests
There is no possibility of unity as the vegan community divides into factions that promote dangerous misinformation and those who do not.
The last six months have been such an unsettling experience for all of us that we’d probably need to come up with a new word for unprecedented if it and its synonyms didn’t already exist. The spread of the novel coronavirus alone would be enough to cause people to lose their bearings — with the unexpected, prolonged financial consequences, the sudden uncertainty and loss of normalcy, the threat to our mental, emotional and physical health — but the upheaval doesn’t end there. One of the most jarring and disorienting aspects of the fallout around COVID-19 for me has been learning how many people I considered part of my larger vegan community have embraced and started spreading misinformation and disinformation about this deadly, highly transmissible disease.
There are numerous messy and hybridizing camps of deniers, down-players, truthers and theorists, a many-headed Hydra: one camp will claim that the coronavirus is a hoax or it’s exaggerated; another is busily pursuing their doctorates at YouTube University and…
