Why Ron Johnson's fringe conspiracy theories are so alarming

(CNN)It's tempting to laugh at ridiculous conspiracy theories. In fact, we should laugh at them, but we must also take them seriously when they move from the fringes into the mainstream and then, most disturbingly, into the halls of power.

It would be OK, for example, to guffaw at Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, after he sat in the Senate on Tuesday, during the first hearing investigating the January coup attempt by followers of then-President Donald Trump, and offered an alternative reality about what occurred. The notion was so far from the plain truth that it would earn the senator a place in the political fantasists' hall of fame.

Frida Ghitis

Johnsons suggested, quoting from a discredited article in the Federalist, that the violent insurrection that left several dead and dozens injured, was just a "jovial," "festive" event that was manipulated by enemies of the former president. That is instead of what it was, according to the FBI, police and our own eyes and ears: A violent attack by supporters of a president who had just lost an election and had riled his backers with the Big Lie -- the baseless claim that he and they had been robbed.

That conspiracy theories exist and are spreading is not news, but hearing them uttered by a US senator during an official congressional hearing marks a new low, one that demands we sit up and take notice.

For five long minutes Johnson read approvingly the claims that the Capitol assault was a false-flag operation conducted by "agents provocateurs, fake Trump protesters," and "a disciplined, uniformed column of attackers."

The mysterious case of Lindsey Graham's political transformation

We've all heard the protesters shouting that they came because Trump told them to. In fact, we heard Trump's own words telling them to go to the Capitol. More than 200 rioters have been charged, and some of them now defend themselves by saying they were doing what the former president instructed them to do.

Knowing all of this, we could just laugh away Johnson's words as the musings of a deluded politician, or even a self-serving one seeking to improve his political standing. But there's a problem much larger than a small man. Tens of millions of Americans believe the same thing. And by uttering that poisonous nonsense from the halls of Congress, Johnson is pumping more fuel into a dangerous fire.

Polls show most Trump supporters believe the Big Lie. A Quinnipiac poll found 76% of Republicans believe that there was widespread fraud in the presidential election, undercutting the legitimacy and of the Biden administration. A USA Today/Suffolk University poll found 58% of Trump voters believe the Johnson theory that the Jan. 6 insurrection was mostly Antifa.

CPAC's dangerous embrace of Trump

The FBI, incidentally, says there's no evidence of Antifa involvement.

During the hearing Tuesday, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar asked the witnesses, law enforcement officials, whether the attack was the work of White supremacist and extremist groups. They all said yes.

As the hearing ended, Klobuchar tried to clarify the record, given Johnson's pronouncements. She tweeted: "...'Provocateurs' did not storm the Capitol. They were not 'fake Trump protestors.' The mood on January 6th was not 'festive.' That is disinformation."

A few Republicans tried to do the same. Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger -- one of the few voices of sanity in a party whose elected leaders cower in terror when asked to address any issue that might bring the wrath of Trump down on them -- slammed Johnson. In a tweet, he declared, "It's disgraceful for a sitting Senator to spread disinformation so blatantly," adding, "it's dangerous and it must stop."

Another Republican, Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, told CBS that the theories Johnson proposed, "are entirely counter to what I know to be true from law enforcement," understatedly adding, "I don't think it's helpful."

Attacking Joe Biden's dog Champ is a low blow

Making matters inevitably worse, Trump, the Republicans' chief disinformation officer, is scheduled to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference this weekend. He'll likely reignite the Big Lie, and effectively hand a megaphone to other conspiracy theorists, who will undoubtedly use Trump's presence as a way to legitimize their dangerous claims. When reporters asked House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Wednesday whether he thought Trump should speak at CPAC, he said "yes." When the same question was posed to Rep. Liz Cheney, one of today's few courageous, and therefore much-maligned Republicans, she said, "I don't think he should be playing a role in the future of the party or the country."

If it's dangerous to have a US senator buying into or promoting crazy theories, it's just as harmful to have a man with a giant media bullhorn deliberately pushing those lies.

Fox News' Tucker Carlson is also shoveling coal into the disinformation furnace. Speaking to his millions of viewers on Monday, he declared there's "no evidence that White supremacists were responsible for Jan 6. That's a lie." It's unclear whether he was trying to defend White supremacists. What's clear is that it is he who is lying. Many people carried symbols tied to White supremacist groups during the riot.

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Carlson has another disinformation campaign, this one seemingly casting doubt on the existence of QAnon, saying that the group did "...not even [have] a website. If it's out there, we could not find it."

That would be news to QAnon adherents -- now multiplying across the globe, from Japan, to Germany, and beyond -- but also to the hundreds of millions around the world who saw the images of the Jan. 6 attack, filled with Trump and QAnon symbol flags, and heard Trump refuse to denounce the movement last October during a town hall, saying in part, "I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate."

Conspiracy theories are nothing new. But when they move from the edges of society to the centers of government and media, they pose grave dangers, as we saw on Jan. 6. Ideas, however ridiculous, cannot be outlawed. But the people who promote such ideas, claiming they are legitimate, credible information, should be corralled back where they belong, on the lunatic fringe.

 

What Tiger Woods's close call makes clear

(CNN)We almost lost Tiger Woods in a gruesome car accident Tuesday along a Southern California highway during these final days of the month when America celebrates Black history. With apologies to late poet T. S. Eliot, such a horror would have made February the cruelest month, instead of April.

Terence Moore

Just four weeks ago, Hank Aaron died at 86. Not only was he a baseball legend, but through his ability as an African American to survive death threats and hate mail while surpassing the immortal record of a White hero (Babe Ruth and his 714 career home runs), Aaron also became a civil rights icon.

Losing Aaron was sorrowful. The close call for Woods -- a living embodiment of recent Black history and excellence -- and the devastating knowledge that it could have been worse is hard to contemplate, especially just a month after we commemorated the death of NBA star Kobe Bryant in a helicopter crash in Los Angeles.

Deputy describes scene of Tiger Woods crash: He was in shock 01:33

The 45-year-old Woods suffered massive leg injuries that required emergency surgery. He faces, at best, a long road to recovery. But he lives, and we rejoice, especially African Americans -- since many of them hug Eldrick Tont Woods tighter than anybody -- and always will.

That's despite everything.

By "everything," I mean Wood's childhood spent -- and adult tendency to remain -- in a mostly White world, and his refusal to move beyond a few centimeters in the direction of embracing the Black Lives Matter movement. Woods did release a statement last summer after George Floyd's death at the knee of a Minneapolis cop. Even so, the carefully crafted words (saying his heart went out to "all of us who are hurting right now") from the winner of a record-tying 82 PGA Tour victories came much later than those of other prominent athletes, which wasn't surprising to me.

In their differences, Tiger Woods and Alex Cora show America belongs to us

He's the anti-LeBron James regarding social issues. While James makes his excellence a platform for political reform, Woods doesn't.

Nevertheless, Tiger Woods is ours. For many African-Americans, he'll remain an icon forever, no matter his personal struggles or political choices.

Woods's eternal connection with the Black community began on what I'll call Emancipation Sunday for golf in April 1997. He likely didn't mean it this way, but it all started for me (and was likely not lost on many) when he wore his red Nike shirt -- as if to place racism in his sport on high alert.

Then, with Blacks, who listened on the radio to Jackie Robinson breaking Major League Baseball's color barrier on April 15, 1947, joining their descendants in front of TV sets everywhere, Woods swung his clubs to perfection. It was just two days shy of the 50th anniversary of Robinson's deed.

Woods pumped his fist in defiance.

Tiger Woods of the United States celebrates after sinking a 4 feet putt to win the 1997 US Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, United States.

He smoked his White competitors by 12 strokes to win the first of his five Masters tournaments at the same Augusta National Golf Club that didn't allow Blacks to join its ranks until barely seven years before that.

Several days later, Oprah Winfrey called me out of nowhere. She asked if I would appear on her show to discuss all things Woods and to explain the sports column I wrote for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution that day. In the piece, I argued that multiple races, religions and creeds wished to claim this younger version of golf's all-time greatest star as their own. I declared: "Tiger, you're Black, period."

I had been inspired to write those words after watching Oprah's show the previous day featuring Woods and his father, the late Earl Woods, who was his son's best friend and lifelong golf coach.

Earl Woods also was his son's image maker. Beyond golf, he envisioned Tiger as a transcendent figure for the planet, which is perhaps one reason why Earl smiled and nodded when his superstar son told Oprah it bothered him when folks called him "African American" since he had a Black father, an Asian mother named Kultida and a touch of Indian ancestry.

Dwyane Wade speaks out after Woods' car accident 02:46

Woods told Oprah he invented the word "Cablinasian" (Caucasian, Black, American Indian and Asian) to describe himself when he was asked as a youth about his race.

But Woods is Black, and I said so on Oprah's show, because of what he has meant to the Black community and how his career has affected the struggle against racism in America. This identity goes beyond the "one-drop rule" principle that dominated the racial dynamics in many states in the early 20th century. That norm said any person with a drop of Black blood was considered Black.

All I know is, a slew of African Americans grabbed golf clubs since they saw somebody who looked like them prospering at chipping, driving and putting.

Tiger Woods: Documentary shines a new light on golf legend 04:12

No doubt, Woods triggered a golf explosion. "The US saw a jump in rounds played of 63 million in 1997 over 1996," said a story on USA today last December, citing information from Golf Datatech.

It was the "Tiger Effect," and in my personal and professional experience, it was most pronounced among Black Americans.

During the 1950s, my dad was among the first Black golfers in Indiana, where I was born and raised in South Bend. So, the sport was already in our blood. Still, once Tiger Woods came on the scene, any family phone conversation for me (and for almost anybody else in Black America) ended with a shout from Mom or Dad of "Tiger's playing!" followed by an abrupt click.

Now Tiger Woods is hurting. He's lying in a bed at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center after being pried out of his vehicle through the driver's side window by paramedics. And the bigger news is that he survived.

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With Woods' five earlier back surgeries and these new injuries that won't vanish soon, he might never bring his major tournament victories (he has 15 already) closer to surpassing Jack Nicklaus' record 18.

He might never play competitive golf again.

 

Families want change after neglect in Canadian care homes proved deadly during the pandemic

 

Ottowa (CNN)The harrowing details of how so many Canadian seniors were left neglected and alone in long term care homes during the pandemic are an agony to accept, let alone, to share. But families say if they're silent now, they too, would be complicit in what they consider to be cruel and preventable deaths.

"No one was there to comfort her, to explain to her, that was the most heartbreaking for me. And she really felt abandoned, that's for sure," says Nicole Jaouich as she describes her mother's last days in a care home in Quebec.

Her mother, Hilda Zlataroff, was 102 years old and suffering from dementia when Covid-19 was first detected in her long-term care facility in March of last year.

Nicole Jaouich, right, and her mother Hilda Zlataroff celebrate Zlataroff's 100th birthday.

Her family says she did not die of the virus but, as an in-room camera placed there by her family painfully documents, she wasted away.

Zlataroff was unable to feed herself without assistance and the video, provided to CNN by her family, shows her at times seemingly in pain, confused, too weak to even hold a glass of water.

"It was heartbreaking for me to know that I wasn't there and that the last six weeks of her life, she starved," said Jaouich as she shares the anguish of watching her mother suffering on camera, but forbidden from going to the care home to help.

"I was looking at my mother through the camera and she was breathing so heavily, you could see she was in pain," she said.

Canadian military brought in to help

Trudeau warns of a dangerous third wave as Canada copes with a vaccine 'drought'

For weeks after initial lockdowns last winter, the situation in dozens of care homes throughout the country, both public and private, grew so grave that by the end of April it was fast becoming a humanitarian crisis. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called in troops to help in some long-term care facilities in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

Trudeau said at the time that Canada was "failing" the elderly and promised that, "in the weeks and months to come, we will all have to ask tough questions about how it came to this."

To date, nearly 22,000 Canadians have died from Covid-19. Many of the families of the thousands of seniors who died in those care homes say it is now time to answer those tough questions.

Coronavirus hit understaffed care homes hard

The crisis began in the early days of the pandemic in March, when provincial health officials across Canada sealed off hundreds of facilities to family and visitors, believing they were protecting the most vulnerable from the virus.

Canada's vaccine rollout stalls, confining seniors to their homes for months to come

But within weeks, families were horrified to learn that many of these facilities -- already chronically understaffed -- were in a state of what they described as chaotic.

"It was quite shocking to see what was happening there, for several days people cannot get a hold of their loved ones," said Nadia Sbaihi in an interview with CNN about her grandfather's death.

Rodrigue Quesnel was 94 years old when he died of Covid-19. He contracted the virus in a long-term care facility outside of Montreal. His family describes him as "larger than life" and still of sound mind but he died of the virus within days last spring.

"If I regret something about those last days it's that we were robbed, particularly in the first wave where we were not allowed to see our loved ones and our loved ones died alone," says Sbaihi.

Some residents were left in soiled clothing and sheets for hours, report says

Covid-19 rapidly spread through hundreds of long term care facilities throughout Canada. By June, the Public Health Agency of Canada acknowledged that 4 in every 5 Covid-19 related deaths were in long term care homes.

"That decision of the government to prevent family caregivers from going in and to not provide for adequate personnel to provide even the most basic care, that decision is completely unforgivable," says Patrick Martin-Ménard, a lawyer representing families at a coroner's inquest now underway in Quebec.

An analysis released by the Canadian Institute for Health Information in June showed that Canada's proportion of deaths occurring in long-term care homes was double that of other developed countries.

Shutout by allies, Canada will produce its own vaccines by the end of 2021

And a study released in Ontario by its advisory group on Covid-19 found that crowding, especially in older facilities, and poor working conditions for staff contributed to the high rate of mortality and morbidity in the facilities.

But perhaps most shocking was a blunt and tragic assessment by the Canadian military after they were sent into some of these facilities.

Released in May in the province of Ontario, the report documents allegations of abuse and gross neglect in at least five care homes.

It documents "dire" conditions where residents were not bathed for days, vulnerable seniors were kept in soiled clothing and sheets for hours, and where Covid-19 patients were allowed to wander.

Justin Trudeau 'disturbed' by Canadian military report alleging care home abuse

It accuses five long term care facilities in the Toronto area of having inadequate hygiene and disinfection practices and further alleges that staff ignored residents who were crying in pain, sometimes for hours.

Ontario's premier was quite emotional when asked about the report and vowed there would be "justice" and "accountability."

"It's heartbreaking, horrific, it's shocking that this can happen here in Canada. It's gut-wrenching, and reading those reports is the hardest thing I've done as premier," said Doug Ford at a press conference in May.

However, Ontario public health officials reported last week that deaths in long term care homes in Ontario from the second wave of Covid-19, which began in September, have now exceeded those in the first wave.

Both the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, where the majority of nursing home deaths occurred, have now introduced new training programs and increased salary and benefits for staff at these facilities.

"I think we have to take a very long look at ourselves collectively and think about the way that we have treated our elderly population, not just during the pandemic but over the past ten, twenty, thirty years," says Martin-Ménard.

Families hope investigations will restore a sense of dignity

Sbaihi believes the treatment of many of their loved ones in care homes was inhumane. She and other family members say that what should come of multiple investigations, still ongoing, is to finally give the elderly the attention and dignity they deserve.

"It's not going to bring anybody back, but hopefully we can have answers ... to give a voice to those who didn't have one or whose voices weren't heard," she says.

Nadia Sbaihi celebrates her grandfather Rodrigue Quesnel's 93rd birthday.

Jaouich says her mother would not have wanted her to accept what happened to thousands of seniors in those care homes. And she says she's grateful that she did finally see her mother in her last hours and give her the comfort she was lacking in her final weeks of life.

"And I held her hand, her hands were so cold, and I was warming her hands and she squeezed my hand ... three times. And this was such a moving moment for me, and I told her 'Mummy I didn't abandon you.'"

Dutch parliament becomes second in a week to accuse China of genocide in Xinjiang

The Dutch parliament on Thursday passed a non-binding motion saying the treatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority in China amounts to genocide, the first such move by a European country.

Activists and United Nations rights experts say at least one million Muslims are being detained in camps in the remote western region of Xinjiang. The activists and some Western politicians accuse China of using torture, forced labor and sterilizations.

China denies any human rights abuses in Xinjiang and says its camps provide vocational training and are needed to fight extremism.

"A genocide on the Uyghur minority is occurring in China," the Dutch motion said, stopping short of directly saying that the Chinese government was responsible.

The Chinese Embassy in The Hague said on Thursday any suggestion of a genocide in Xinjiang was an "outright lie" and the Dutch parliament had "deliberately smeared China and grossly interfered in China's internal affairs."

The frozen Hofvijver pond is seen outside the Dutch parliament buildings in The Hague, Netherlands, Tuesday, February 9.

Canada passed a non-binding resolution labeling China's treatment of the Uyghurs genocide earlier this week.

The Dutch motion said that actions by the Chinese government such as "measures intended to prevent births" and "having punishment camps" fell under United Nations Resolution 260, generally known as the genocide convention.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte's conservative VVD party voted against the resolution.

'Great concern'

Foreign Minister Stef Blok said the government did not want to use the term genocide, as the situation has not been declared as such by the United Nations or by an international court.

"The situation of the Uyghurs is a cause of great concern", Blok told reporters after the motion was passed, adding that the Netherlands hoped to work with other nations on the matter.

The author of the motion, lawmaker Sjoerd Sjoerdsma of the centre-left D-66 Party, has separately proposed lobbying the International Olympic Committee to move the 2022 Winter Olympics away from Beijing.

Leaked records expose China's Xinjiang camps 06:57

"Recognizing the atrocities that are taking place against the Uyghurs in China for what they are, namely genocide, prevents the world from looking the other way and forces us into action," he told Reuters in an emailed response to questions.

In a statement on its website, the Chinese Embassy in The Hague said the Uyghur population in Xinjiang has been growing in in recent years, enjoying a higher standard of living, and a longer life expectancy.

"How can you call this a genocide?" it said. "Xinjiang-related issues are never about human rights, ethnicity or religion, but about combating violent terrorism and secession."

China's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva accused Western powers on Wednesday of using the Uyghur issue to meddle in his country's internal affairs.

 

How the Czech Republic slipped into a Covid disaster, one misstep at a time

(CNN)On an epidemiological map of the world, the Czech Republic shows up as a tiny island of doom and gloom. While the global number of new coronavirus cases has been dropping for six consecutive weeks, the Central European nation of 10 million has been experiencing near record levels of new infections.

A new, more infectious variant of the virus has spread across the country, pushing Czech hospitals to the brink of collapse. The country's death toll has just surpassed 20,000. Its death rate is among the highest in the world.

Germany, fearing new coronavirus variants, imposes border checks with Austria and Czech Republic

There is no reason for the country to be among the worst hit. As a relatively wealthy nation and a member of the European Union, the Czech Republic has access to vaccines, medical equipment and track-and-trace tech solutions. It has a democratically elected government. Its health care system is well respected, its economy fairly strong.

Instead, the current Czech catastrophe is akin to death by a thousand cuts, a result of dozens of tiny missteps, late decisions and botched public health messages, experts tell CNN.

On Friday, the government conceded it had no other choice but to impose a very strict lockdown starting Monday, just as much of the rest of the world is starting to talk about easing.

"The government has adopted an unfortunate strategy of making decisions based on the current hospital capacities, which means they often come too late," said Jan Kulveit, senior research scholar at the Future of Humanity Institute, a multidisciplinary research institute at the University of Oxford, in England.

He said the number of patients in hospitals paints a delayed picture of the epidemic, because people tend to end up needing medical attention some time after getting infected.

"There is a huge difference between adopting the measures on time and waiting 10 days. A delay of 10 days, when the reproduction number is 1.4 means a doubling of the epidemic," he said.

The Czech government has not responded to a request for comment. Speaking in the Parliament on Friday, Prime Minister Andrej Babiš admitted his government has made "far too many mistakes," but said it was not the time to argue about the past.

Explaining the need for the new lockdown, he said: "I understand it's hard, but it's very important ... we need to do this together and I hope everyone will understand and give us one last chance so that we can manage this together."

Too little, too late

Dr. Rastislav Maďar, the dean of the University of Ostrava's medical school and one of the country's top epidemiologists, points to three decisions as the root cause of the current crisis. The first came when the government overruled its own advisers, including Maďar himself, and refused to reinstate a mask mandate in the summer; the second when it decided to reopen shops ahead of Christmas; and the third when it failed to react to the new variant popping up in early January.

"These were the three big errors and right now, we are just praying there won't be a fourth one," he said.

Maďar has a personal connection to the crisis. As the former coordinator of the government's coronavirus restrictions advisory group, he resigned after Babiš overruled the group's call to make masks mandatory when the epidemic showed signs of strengthening in late August.

The pushback against masks came just as the government decided to reopen schools at the beginning of September. "This led to the increased mobility of roughly 2 million people, and [the epidemic] exploded," Maďar said.

Politics likely played a part in the decision making. "This was the moment when the epidemic started to spread again, but there was still time to stop it ... but it didn't happen, because there was an election coming up," said Dagmar Dzúrová, a demography professor and the deputy head of the Department of Social Geography and Regional Development at Charles University in Prague.

Dzúrová is not the only expert pointing to the early October vote as a key moment in the battle against the virus. "Many European countries experienced a second wave, the Czech Republic wasn't unique in that," Kulveit said. "But unlike other countries, it didn't manage to suppress the second wave, and I think the election played a role in that," he added.

Babiš argued the restrictions were costly and unpopular, but said his decision was not motivated by the election. When pressed on the masks issue in Parliament, Babiš accused the opposition of politicking, saying "the regional election was the worst thing that could happen to Covid-19."

"The opposition was keen to capitalize on this too, criticizing the measures, calling face masks 'muzzles' and questioning why we should wear them when the case numbers are still low," Maďar said. "The problem of course is that we cannot react to the numbers we are seeing right now, because if we do this, we are two weeks too late," he added.

The government's reluctance to act meant the epidemic got out of control.

By late October, a hard lockdown was inevitable. Babiš was forced to admit he and his government had made mistakes in handling the outbreak and pleaded with people to follow strict lockdown rules. "I could not imagine that this would happen," he said at the time.

But another error came soon. As infections started to decline and with Christmas just around the corner, the government became impatient and decided to ignore its own data-based rules on how to reopen safely. The PES system was introduced in November and was meant to determine the government's next steps based on the epidemiological situation; any easing was meant to be backed by data. The risk level was determined by a number of factors, including the reproduction number, the positivity rate and the number of infections per 100,000 people. "They didn't follow their own rules, the system was telling them something and they ignored it," Kulveit said.

Czech teenagers deployed to overwhelmed hospitals

"They didn't withstand the pressure and agreed to start lifting some restrictions so that people could go out and do their Christmas shopping, despite the fact that infections were still higher than when the lockdown was imposed," Maďar said. Easing over Christmas led to a surge on top of a surge, and another lockdown just after the Christmas holidays.

The politicking didn't end with the close of the polling stations, experts told CNN, mostly because another key election is coming this year. "We are already in an election campaign time and that is lowering the willingness of the political parties to find consensus," Kulveit said.

"The government isn't listening to the experts and is dealing with the pandemic based on its political needs and when the measures are being explained to the public, it's done by politicians, mostly by the Prime Minister, which means that a part of the public is prone to boycott the rules for political reasons," Dzúrová said. She pointed to countries like Germany where politicians mostly leave it up to the experts to communicate with the public.

Babiš has mostly dismissed the criticism that experts -- not himself -- should be the ones communicating with the public. "Over the summer, we had so many experts that people didn't know what is true," he said in the Parliament.

Another problem with the Czech approach, Dzúrová said, is a lack of meaningful financial support. This has led to low compliance of the rules among those who simply cannot afford to obey them. For example, people told to quarantine are entitled to just 60% of their average salary, which is paid by their employers in the first two weeks. And while businesses are entitled for compensations, a number of industry bodies have criticized them as inadequate.

Enforcement has been a problem too, Maďar said. "People are tired, they are meeting up privately, hosting parties, traveling into the mountains, there's a backlash against the police, which cannot do much anyway," he said.

A health care worker takes care of a patient in the Covid-19 ward at Hospital Karvina-Raj on January 11, 2021 in Karvina, Czech Republic.

With the government's message increasingly muddled by politics, disinformation started to spread. "Again, this is not unique to the Czech Republic, but there seem to be more people who believe in conspiracy theories and think the risk from the virus has been overblown," Kulveit said.

The Czech media, he said, has contributed to some of the confusion earlier in the pandemic. "There's often this logic of 'for and against.' So if you have a guest who says face masks are useful, let's also have a guest who says they are not. And if you have a guest who says coronavirus is dangerous, you also need to invite someone who says it's not dangerous and most people are fine."

This has distorted reality, Kulveit believes. "Of course there are debates going on in the expert circles, but if you look at the field of epidemiology, some 95% of experts agree on the consensus and then you have perhaps 5% who dissent, but in the media, this is presented as 50:50, and then on social media, it could become 20:80," he added.

Victims of their own success

The Czechs might be more prone to trust conspiracy theories because their country went through the first wave of the pandemic relatively unscathed, thanks to an early decision to lock down.

"As a result, a big part of the society felt like nothing bad had happened and that the measures, which came at a huge cost, were not necessary ... there wasn't enough emphasis on the fact that nothing bad happened because we had the measures in place," Dzúrová said.

In public health, this is known as the paradox of success. When preventative measures work well, the public might underestimate the severity of the threat and come to believe the prevention was a waste of time.

A medical worker takes a sample from a person at the drive-in coronavirus testing station in Prague.

"People saw the cost of the measures but not the virus, so there was a huge spike in the voices doubting the seriousness of the disease and of the situation and that is not something you would see in a country that has experienced thousands of deaths," Kulveit said.

The Czechs are not unique in becoming victims of their own success, but the government's inability to explain the issues is making the situation worse, he added. The government has launched a coronavirus information campaign, but it focused mostly on the restrictions and, more recently, vaccinations.

The current crisis in the Czech Republic is partially down to the new, more infectious variant of the virus first identified in the UK.

Dzúrová and Maďar said the country didn't pay enough attention to the new variant, not sequencing enough samples to figure out how widespread the new strain was and how to stop it from spreading across the country. This is something the UK managed successfully in January, with a combination of very strict lockdown measures and intensive sequencing work. By the time the Czechs started sequencing, the UK variant was dominant.

Masks made Czech Republic the envy of Europe. Now they've blown it

"The measures that are in place right now are strong enough to suppress the original variants of the coronavirus, but not the new, more infectious variants," Kulveit said. He, Dzúrová and Maďar have all urged the government to tighten the restrictions as soon as possible, to bring the infection levels down.

The country is currently in a softer lockdown compared to some other countries, including the UK. Schools are closed apart from the first two grades of elementary education. Non-essential shops are mostly closed and restaurants are open for takeout only.

Starting Monday, the restrictions will tighten. People won't be allowed to leave their homes for other than essential reasons and even the youngest children will switch to remote learning. Traveling between regions will be banned.

But according to the experts, the government is making a big mistake by refusing to shutter factories. "The new variant changes the rules of the game. Factories are open and people are traveling to work on public transport, and this could lead to collapse of the health care system," Maďar said.

The country's main trade unions also called for industrial production and manufacturing to be halted, but the government argued such move would be far too costly. The sector makes up about 40% of the Czech GDP.

"I fear that big part of the Czech public still doesn't understand how bad the situation is and what is truly horrifying is that some people seem to have accepted the fact that we are seeing 100, 150 people die unnecessarily each day, and they don't see it as something that's alarming, but as something that is natural and inevitable, when in fact it is a complete tragedy," Dzúrova said.