Media malpractice in response to Covid

 Elizabeth Economou:

If there's one thing we've learned from the COVID-19 lockdowns, it's that the mainstream media duped us time and again.  Not surprisingly, trust in the Fourth Estate is at an all-time low.

According to Axios, nearly 60 percent of Americans agree with the statement that "journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations."

From the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, the pro-lockdown media propagated an apocalyptical narrative, dismissing any hope whatsoever — even though most people infected with the coronavirus eventually recovered.

For nearly a year, the media manically obsessed over cases, cases, cases — instead of highlighting more meaningful metrics, like hospitalization rates and the devastating consequences of lockdowns.  Cases surged because testing increased.  For example, days before Thanksgiving, the line from the Home Depot to the coronavirus testing site on Aurora Avenue North in Seattle, where I happen to live, extended nearly four blocks.

It bears repeating that the survival rate for those 69 and younger is 99.5 percent or better, inferring from the infection fatality ratio.  The IFR is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the number of individuals who die of the disease among all infected individuals.

Incessantly, we were told to mask up and stay six feet apart.  All the while, healthy people of all ages were urged to quarantine.

We now know that asymptomatic spread is still being weaponized to justify draconian lockdowns — even as a recent research study of nearly 10 million people in China reveals "not a single transmission of Coronavirus from a person without symptoms."  This is big news.  And yet, not a peep from the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, on the shuttering of nearly 100,000 businesses nationwide, job losses of up to 40 million, the erosion of our civil liberties, and PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests with false positive rates as high as 60 percent, the media's silence was deafening.

And while social distancing might have helped to the stop the spread of COVID-19, it also led to dire repercussions among America's youths.  In some areas of the country, suicide rates among kids aged 12 to 17 soared nearly 70 percent, according to the CDC.  Again, the media downplayed the fallout from isolation and lockdowns — and still does. 

In October, the media mostly ignored the Great Barrington Declaration in which infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists clamored for "focused protection" — a more compassionate approach to COVID-19, in contrast to locking everyone down.  The least vulnerable were encouraged to resume life as normal, with more emphasis on protecting the elderly and the infirm.

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The other group that has pushed this bogus agenda is the teachers' unions.  They claim it is unsafe to return to normal schooling even though students in red states have done so with no ill-effects.  I am also dubious about the requirement that those who have been vaccinated should continue to mask up.