https://vimeo.com/449941268

The decay of the Romanian education system has created a fertile ground for Covid conspiracy theories, many of which originate in right-wing America. Maria Cernat joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast produced in collaboration with Other News.

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay, and welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. This episode is produced in collaboration with Other News. Other News is an international press platform that disseminates analysis, insights, and information about global issues in English, Spanish, and Italian. And you can find it at Other-News.info.

This podcast is a continuing part of a series I'm doing about countries that rarely get talked about in the North American press, but should be, of course, every country should be.

But these are particularly large and important countries that get almost no attention at all. Today, we're going to talk about Romania, which is the seventh most populated country in Europe. It joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007. Romania has become one of the worst countries affected by the COVID pandemic. There have been 75,000 cases so far, 3154 deaths, and there has recently been a very large spike in infections.

Now joining us to talk about the current situation in Romania, as well as give us some of the historical context is Maria Cernat. She's a graduate of the faculty of Journalism and Communication Sciences and the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Bucharest, where she completed her Ph.D. in philosophy.

She's currently an assistant professor at the Department of Communication, Foreign Languages, and Public Relations of Titu Maiorescu University. And she also teaches communications and public relations of the National University of Political Studies and Political Administration. Thanks very much for joining us, Maria.

Maria Cernat

Thanks very much for having me, Paul.

Paul Jay

So start with what's going on in terms of the pandemic. Why is Romania spiking so badly, and why is the country becoming one of the countries most affected in Europe?

Maria Cernat

Well, there are several reasons. First of all, we had some very good measures being taken, and everybody was afraid. The public responded pretty well to the government's recommendation to stay at home. And we stayed at home for almost two months and we saw that the for corona pandemic, the number of cases was getting smaller and smaller. So it was a good time they thought, the politicians, to renounce some of those very harsh regulations. But I think it was also the pressure of the business elite; they wanted to start the economy again.

There was always this obsession with starting the economy again, but not the economy in general. They haven't thought of changing the economy so that it would take into consideration the pandemic. No, they wanted to have the good-old-ways economy that would profit only some people, and to leave things just the way they were, and not take into consideration the fact that we have a pandemic, OK.

So they opened up bars. They started to allow people to move from place to place. That was one part of the issue. Another source of the problem was that Romania was a neo-liberal country and dominated by the neo-liberal ideology for almost three decades, since 1989. And we have this very individualistic and selfish perspective where we don't care. I say that the social issue is so thin that people don't care.