Legacy Media Calls Americans 'COVID Deniers,' After Years Of Being Proven Wrong

It's been five years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and legacy media types still can't admit they got it wrong. And not only that, they blame partisan politics for the results, while ignoring their own role in using partisan politics on COVID restrictions. 

Just this week, The Atlantic published a lengthy article from columnist David Frum, a former Republican speechwriter who like so many of his ideological allies, have found it much more lucrative to become a far-left Democrat. Frum's article is rife with inaccuracies, misinformation, misdirection and misplaced blame. An expected, but still frustrating outcome from an entire profession incapable of taking accountability for their mistakes.

In short, it's a microcosm of the pandemic and our response. An elite fringe weaponizing their authority to demand compliance with nonsensical mandates, then blaming the public for not listening.

Former President Joe Biden. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The Atlantic Can't Accept It Was Wrong About COVID

Frum's list of absurdities starts with accusing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for launching a campaign for president on "an appeal to anti-vaccine ideology."

DeSantis, of course, did no such thing. 

What he did do though, is host a round table of experts like Dr. Scott Atlas, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, who correctly assessed that COVID vaccines should be prioritized for the elderly and extremely sick. As well as highlighting the lack of evidence supporting masks, school closures, and one-size-fits-all vaccination policies. Like those championed by Frum, The Atlantic, and their political party.

Those experts, and DeSantis, have been completely vindicated; their concerns and suggestions have been conclusively proven correct. School closures were a disastrous failure. Masks don't work. Lockdowns carried immense ancillary harms. And vaccine efficacy rapidly wanes to effectively zero, making them especially useless for younger, healthier age groups. Here's how Frum describes the total repudiation of his ideology.

"Five years later, one side has seemingly triumphed," he writes. "The winner is not the side that initially prevailed, the side of public safety. The winner is the side that minimized the disease, then rejected public-health measures to prevent its spread, and finally refused the vaccines designed to protect against its worst effects."

This is outright reality-denial. Public health measures did not prevent the spread of the virus. Not even a little. Masks did nothing; South Korea has the highest confirmed COVID case rate on earth, as just one example. The original vaccines were effectively useless by mid-late 2021, as new variants changed the complexion of the virus. Iceland, for example, saw its COVID mortality rate explode despite one of the world's highest vaccination and booster rates.

But this is the bubble that extremists like Frum have created for themselves: any information that does not confirm their biases is either ignored or discarded. Particularly because legacy media like The Atlantic has no interest in reporting it.

Frum criticizes Trump for hiring a "strident critic of COVID-vaccine mandates to lead the FDA." 

First, that would be Dr. Marty Makary, an eminently qualified expert who correctly pointed out that vaccine mandates were discriminatory, pointless, and ineffective. That's indisputable fact. And it's one of many utterly indefensible insults Frum hurls at Trump's nominees. 

He says Bhattacharya, nominated as head of NIH, "advocated for letting COVID spread unchecked to encourage herd immunity." 

This is patently, entirely, completely false. Bhattacharya said that older age groups or at-risk individuals should be sheltered and protected, while younger, healthier people, at virtually no risk, did not suffer through unnecessary restrictions with side effects more harmful than COVID. That was undoubtedly the correct approach, but because it came from someone associated with Donald Trump, Frum blatantly lies in order to pander to his party. 

He then relies on inaccurate modeling to say that if more Americans had received two-doses of COVID vaccines, deaths would have been lower. Except the timeframe referenced is March 2020 to February 2022. Vaccines became available for the most part in 2021, and had lost virtually all efficacy by late 2021. There's no actual evidence whatsoever to suggest more vaccinations in late 2021 would have prevented deaths in 2022. But Frum, who claims to represent the party of science, ignores that to use a computer-generated guess from biased, incompetent researchers. Sounds right.

"Vaccine rejection became a badge of group loyalty, one that ultimately cost many lives," he says. Ironically, it is group loyalty that cost lives. Loyalty to far left ideology that led to increased deaths from suicide, despair, unemployment, and missed medical care. Because Democrats like Fauci unnecessarily scared people to get them to comply.

He tries to say that Republicans disproportionally died of COVID because of vaccine rejection, another assertion that's been proved false. Frum doesn't care about what the numbers say when they contradict his views, though, instead using a debunked Yale model to inaccurately blame Trump. 

It's easy now to forget how much misinformation "experts" spread in the early days of COVID. A trend that continued long into the pandemic. Frum though, says that the "internet" meant that the public saw "experts" lying and grew to mistrust them instead of "deferring to medical authority."

"Hundreds of thousands of people plunged into an alternate mental universe during COVID‑19 lockdowns," he says. Yes. People like Frum, who have steadfastly denied everything we've learned, because it proved his party wrong. 

"In public affairs, our bias is usually to pay most attention to disappointments and mistakes. In the pandemic, there were many errors: the partisan dogma of the COVID minimizers; the capitulation of states and municipalities to favored interest groups," he says.  

"The wrong people have profited from the immediate aftermath. But if we remember the pandemic accurately, the future will belong to those who rose to the crisis when their country needed them."

Again, Frum is accidentally right. The wrong people have profited. Anthony Fauci received a lucrative book deal and a cushy teaching job, as well as a preemptive federal pardon for his enormous wrongdoing. Frum is still cashing huge checks to lie to his audience and demonize Americans for not listening to his delusional ideology. Former CDC officials who lied about vaccine efficacy will endlessly profit from board seats, advisory roles, and consulting fees.

Media figures like Rachel Maddow, who relentlessly contributed misinformation and falsehoods, are still paid tens of millions of dollars to continue lying to Frum's party.

There have been no consequences or negative outcomes for the Democrats who misled the public. Remember the polling data showing the left wildly overestimated the likelihood of hospitalization from COVID, while the right was much more likely to choose correctly? Frum never mentions that, because it's inconvenient in his delusional world view. 

Reality, as we learned during COVID, so often is.