Opinion of right-wingers...

[Sumner 1868]

...who in 2014 were screaming for lockdowns over Ebola but now deny COVID exists?

[John Dule]

You know, it's really funny how conspiracy theorists operate. In January when COVID was just starting to spread, sites like 4Chan were frothing at the mouth over how deadly the virus was and saying the government was hiding it from us to cleanse the population. Ironically, I think those people were some of the first to actually recognize how big of a thing this would be. But then when the government started to take it seriously, they did a complete 180 and started calling it a hoax. You'd think they'd be happy to be right for once, but their paranoia prevented them from enjoying the win.

[urutzizu]

What Dule describes isn't a phenomenon just limited to 4Chan btw. In many European countries also, the hard-right politicans were actually the ones who were first taking it seriously and calling for hard lockdowns and accusing Governments of not acting early enough: FPÖ in Austria was calling for a Lockdown on the 13th of March already, SD were the ones who first broke with Tegnells policy, PVV and FvD wanted full lockdown (while Rutte was still going for pseudo-herd immunity), Nigel Farage was basically the only UK politican who was calling for banning flights and hard social distance measures against the Government scientists at the beginning. Same in many other countries. Then when Lockdown actually happened, and started working, these people were the first to downplay the Virus and want the measures lifted immediately (to the point where FPÖ are now calling their own Lockdown "Corona hysteria".) It always interested me whether this is really just Contrarianism and being against anything the Government does, or whether it actually may have something to do with the extent to which our political debate in influenced by the American one, and a european far-right political position that is squarely contradicting what their messiah in Washington is saying cannot survive long term.