IB-Salut, the public health service of the Balearic Islands, has refused to reinstate Dr. Nadiya Popel, who worked in the Emergency Department of the Mateu Orfila Hospital in Mahón until she was expelled in September 2023. She will now serve two years. The news was announced on Menorca Diary.

In April 1997, the writer Maria Àngels Anglada gave a conference in Olot organized by Ecofòrum, an association that defended that economic development always must be tied up to environmental awareness. Anglada's lecture —titled Nature and Greek culture—he began by explaining that the effects of human actions on forests had already been documented by the classics (who, as if they knew how to predict the future, sometimes lamented our reckless attitude). The works of the Greeks even left evidence of fires that, without the personnel or tools to fight them, could burn for months. Fires, then, have always existed. Heat, there always has been. These are the arguments used by climate crisis deniers in the face of the infernal heat we have suffered in recent years and the disasters they have brought.

There are concepts that, despite having been coined just a few days ago, are used as if they had an immemorial history. Some become so successful that they are used left and right, and consequently, they end up being distorted. The concept of denialism It is part of those words that began as designating an ultra-specific fact but later became a kind of multipurpose insult or something even worse, as we will see later. In 1987, the French historian Henry Rousso created and developed the idea of denialism in the essay Vichy syndrome in the sense it has today. The concept referred specifically to the movement that at the time denied the reality of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes in general, both in France and other European countries. He distinguished denialism from what he called "legitimate historical revisionism," that is, a reasoned and critical rereading of history based on new data or perspectives. What exactly does this distinction mean? Claiming that the Vichy regime led by Marshal Pétain did not participate in the deportation of French Jews to the extermination camps is an extreme exercise in denialism, because there is thousands of pieces of documentary evidence to prove it. On the other hand, rethinking the figure of François Mitterrand, or even the resistance hero Jean Moulin, for example, based on documents and photographs that appeared very late, in the 1980s, represents a historical revision of France's true role during the Second World War, not a form of covert denialism. By the way, Rousso is also the author of the successful expression "a passé who passes does not" ("a past that does not happen").

Vaccines are one of the greatest success stories in history, but the fact that they are a tool of preventive medicine and are administered before there is a disease in order to avoid it (the individual is healthy) becomes an argument for the most reluctant population and, above all, for antivaccinationists. Moreover, as with all drugs, there is the possibility that those vaccinated may suffer some adverse effects, and these risk figures, which are anecdotal compared to the benefits, are often taken out of context and used as a deterrent to vaccination. In fact, in recent months a multitude of false anti-vaccine messages have been circulating on social media to discourage covid-19 vaccination. 

Some say that the virus does not exist and that the pandemic is a conspiracy to dominate the population. Others, on Telegram channels with more than a hundred thousand followers, say that for decades the elites have wanted to turn a virus into "a biological weapon to cleanse" the world and that the authorities are taking advantage of the "pandemic" by subduing the population with masks, curfews and vaccinations. But in recent months, against the backdrop of the mass vaccination campaign, the messages of people who have not previously been sceptical have also become more radical, especially about vaccines: they believe that they intentionally cause serious side effects or that they will control our brains "with 5G". Most of those who defend these ideas are denialists and anti-vaccine, but now because of the exceptional situation caused by covid there is also a confused or skeptical population that reproduces them, intentionally or not. They have different ideologies and come from different social classes, but they have one thing in common: they distrust governments and official sources.

Denialism about the virus has penetrated little in Catalonia. Fortunately. But we cannot declare ourselves immune territory, far from it. Because the confusion is general and global, and therefore also affects us. In fact, this unscientific movement, which confuses the necessary critical sense in the face of reality with adherence to all kinds of conspiracies, often hallucinatory, operates mainly through social networks and takes advantage of any excuse to spread and create doubts. It plays with fears -including, of course, the fear of death-, with political and institutional disaffection, with the atavistic distrust of power -often justified-, it makes itself strong on fake news or the belief in dubious alternative therapies, it uses rage against the elites.... This set of factors that have often given wings to anti-system populisms are the ones that now, cooked again, are serving to create ghosts supposedly hidden behind the pandemic.