In the spring of 2020, a deliberately cultivated disease fear swept across the population. Everyone was urged to do everything possible to avoid the invisible enemy.
It is an implausible request.
The terrorist-era slogan “If you see something, say something” was bad enough. This was “You can’t see something, so just do whatever.”
If you cannot see it, you cannot know where it is, in which case people filled the epistemic void with fantasies of their own invention.
It’s on this sandwich! Wait, it’s on this whole bag of groceries! It’s in this room while that room seems safer! It’s probably on the pen I just used so I’d better wash my hands! I should wear this helmet and these gloves, plus wash my dishes five times before using them! And so on.
It was all madness and it immediately affected the subject of voting, which quickly became a subject of discussion. If we are social distancing and staying home, how can we have normal elections with crowds at polling places? Surely we need a completely different system.
It was in this thicket of sudden frenzy that the CDC got involved. But not eventually involved; it was involved at the very outset.
The page is now scrubbed from the CDC website as of January this year but it has long posted voting protocols as a means of controlling infectious disease spread.
What’s fascinating is the timing. The page was updated to mention the necessity of mail-in voting on March 12, 2020. That’s the same day at Donald Trump’s famous hostage-style video that announced universal travel restrictions for Americans traveling to and from the UK and the EU, for the first time in US history.
He was so nervous that he actually garbled a sentence. He said that he would stop all goods transport. He meant to say that he would not! The correction came a day later but only after the stock market crashed.
That very day, someone went to the page on the CDC site and added that good hygiene involves pushing mail-in voting. We only know this thanks to Archive.org and checking the day-by-day timeline.
Hellbound and Down 