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Why Is Mainstream Media Pushing More Disease Panic?

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Why Is Mainstream Media Pushing More Disease Panic?
The New York Times building in New York City on June 30, 2020. (Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images)
Jeffrey A. Tucker
10/19/2022
Updated:
10/19/2022
0:00
Commentary

A new variant, new boosters, new mandates, new exhortations to mask up and stay safe. Will it ever end? Not if the New York Times gets its way.

The politicization of disease was pretty much verboten throughout most of the 20th century. Public-health wisdom strongly recommended against it. It serves no one. It drives stigmatization and division and drives irrational behavior that is inconsistent with health in general. In the polio scares of the early 1940s, for example, the predecessor to the March of Dimes declined to enlist the public help of President Franklin D. Roosevelt precisely to keep politics out of it.

Calm, reason, science: these were the watchwords of every past pandemic. “Let us all keep a cool head about the Asian influenza as the statistics on the spread and virulence of the disease begin to accumulate,” wrote the New York Times in an editorial published Sept. 18, 1957. “Death rates are not expected to be high this time if an epidemic does strike because many of the complications of flu can be controlled with modern medicines not available forty years ago.”

In fact, the Asian flu was quite deadly—more so than COVID among a younger age cohort—but panic contributes nothing to disease mitigation. As a responsible vessel of journalism, the Times back then did its best to urge calm, having learned the lesson of the past that people are subject to wild frenzies based on mortal fears and rumors. The paper saw its role as pushing reason over fear, science over myth, and medicine rather than social upheaval.

That’s how it began in 2020, too. On March 4, Psychology Today published a piece entitled “Why Your Doctor Is Not Panicking About Novel Coronavirus.” “Yes, this virus is different and worse than other coronaviruses, but it still looks very familiar. We know more about it than we don’t know .... Doctors know what to do with respiratory viruses.”
The same day, a Harvard emergency room physician wrote in Slate: “COVID-19 is a relatively benign disease for most young people, and a potentially devastating one for the old and chronically ill, albeit not nearly as risky as reported. … We need to divert our focus away from worrying about preventing systemic spread among healthy people—which is likely either inevitable, or out of our control—and commit most if not all of our resources toward protecting those truly at risk of developing critical illness and even death: everyone over 70, and people who are already at higher risk from this kind of virus.”
And on Feb. 28, Anthony Fauci wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine: “This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza.”

It turns out that all these venues were right, even Fauci before he changed his mind. They were correct because we had all the evidence we needed in February 2020 that this was a textbook respiratory virus with a huge age-based risk stratification.

A new study examining infection fatality rates the world over concludes that COVID “had a median of 0.035 percent for the 0-59 years old population, and 0.095 percent for the 0-69 years old. The median IFR was 0.0003 percent at 0-19 years, 0.003 percent at 20-29 years, 0.011 percent at 30-39 years, 0.035 percent at 40-49 years, 0.129 percent at 50-59 years, and 0.501 percent at 60-69 years.”

Overall, that is less than what mainstream outlets were predicting in February 2020. This has awesome implications for how we should judge the response, which deployed tactics never before experienced in modern Western history.

The response was state-imposed and universally draconian, but with that came economic policies that wrecked trade and commerce and drove many trillions in government spending and printing that vex us today with inflation and dramatically declining living standards. Liberty is now in grave danger, not just in the United States, but everywhere.

The huge error here was doing precisely the opposite of what the Harvard physician said in the early days. We attempted extreme measures to stop the spread among the general population rather than protecting the vulnerable. In other words, we mistook COVID for AIDS, or, more ridiculously, like the gradeschool game of cooties. In fact, most of the people who hammered out the response came from the world of AIDS funding, people like Deborah Birx.

In the course of this, everything we knew from decades, centuries, and even two millennia about natural immunity and the scalable immune system was tossed out the window. We reverted to the basest-possible mindset about disease: forget everything else and run away. Of course it did not work. It was not possible to control such a transmissible and mild virus through state power.

The evidence is in. More evidence than we ever needed, simply because we knew all of this already back in early 2020!

But we live in very strange times. It’s impossible to resist the idea that someone, somewhere wanted to ignore the evidence then and now for nefarious reasons, massively confuse the population, and push mitigation strategies that violate every tenet of civilized life.

And guess what? Even given every experience and every study, even given the obvious and gigantic calamity of the last 30 months, it is still going on!

Here is the New York Times today on what you should do in this holiday season. “You should talk with your family members ahead of time before gathering and figure out your game plan. Ask if people are up-to-date on their vaccinations, and encourage people to take additional precautions if a high-risk family member is attending, which could include limiting the amount of people you invite to Thanksgiving dinner or investing in a few heat lamps so that you can move the meal outside.”

Can you even believe this?

This is just astounding advice, given that we know vaccines do not protect against either infection or spread, and we’ve known this for the better part of a year. In fact, this is family and fun-shattering advice, still freaking out about house parties and pretending as if we know precisely how many people can be in a room before the evil pathogen shows up. And only the Times would advise in favor of banning the unvaccinated from a family gathering! It’s utterly cruel, divisive, and unscientific.

Actually, it gets worse. They advise testing before gathering with anyone and masking up in any public spaces, even now after two years with no solid evidence that masks achieve anything in stopping spread even if you thought that was a good idea. The Times admits that “total isolation isn’t feasible for many people” and so says instead you should keep behaving like a sanatorium-bound paranoid mysophobe while dressing in personal protective equipment from China.

I’m sorry, but these people are totally bonkers.

It’s quite the comedown from 1958! The question is: is there anyone left who still believes this rot? Fewer than ever, but they are still around. I see them from time to time, lurking around corners with certainty that a pathogen is out to get them, masking up and even shielding their faces, and wearing the modern equivalent of sackcloth and ashes like post-structuralist flagellants who let their personality disorders rule both their interior and exterior lives.

The question is why the Times enables and encourages them? It has to be about control. Maybe this is their version of an October surprise. Maybe they want to look ever more ridiculous to anyone who doesn’t live in a coastal city. Maybe it’s all about selling vaccines. I don’t know how else to explain it. Regardless, it is grotesquely irresponsible.

At some point, the ruling class has to bow to reality and science. The country embarked on a disastrous path 30 months ago. All we can do now is admit and try our best to restore freedom and constitutional government, even in the midst of the crisis caused almost entirely by the pandemic response.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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Jeffrey A. Tucker
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Author
Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
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