Ready For More? Media Outlets Still Purposefully Misleading Readers To Push For Masks, COVID-Era Restrictions
Publication argues pandemic restrictions worked despite evidence of policy failures
They were always going to fight back.
After years of mask mandates, vaccine passports and lockdowns utterly failed to stop COVID, it seemed like the tides had finally turned. A number of politicians associated with authoritarian policies either resigned or lost elections. General conversations had either moved toward accepting that our Anthony Fauci-led COVID response was a disaster, or in the case of those who supported those mandates initially, moved toward ignoring that it ever happened.
For many, it's an assumption that society has moved past pretending that masks and other non-pharmaceutical interventions are necessary. But that assumption is based on the premise that people can admit they were wrong. And if we've learned anything from how the mainstream media conducts itself, it's that it will never, ever, quite literally never, admit it was wrong.
So even five and a half years removed from the start of our pointless restrictions, it hasn't given up on bringing them right back. As evidenced by the media openly advocating for science-denial and more mandates moving forward.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, departs following a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, Nov. 4, 2021. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Yes, The Media Wants Masks Back As Soon As Possible
A new article in The Atlantic has laid down the gauntlet, making the absurdist claim that "pandemic revisionism" has taken over. What does "pandemic revisionism" mean, according to them? Acknowledging that our COVID policies were devastatingly harmful mistakes, that public health "experts" were wrong, and that the evidence overwhelmingly supports those who spoke out against masks and other restrictions.
"Pandemic revisionism has gone mainstream," the article says. "More than five years after COVID-19 began spreading in the United States, a new conventional wisdom has taken hold in some quarters: Public-health officials knew or should have known from the start that pandemic restrictions would do more harm than good, forced them on the public anyway, and then doubled down even as the evidence piled up against them. When challenged, these officials stifled dissent in order to create an illusion of consensus around obviously flawed policies."
Yes. That's all absolutely, objectively true. Fauci and Francis Collins did "stifle dissent," they emailed each other openly planning it. The Biden administration threatened social media companies if they didn't censor anyone who spoke out against their COVID vaccination policies. There were decades of planning documents painstainkingly prepared by agencies like the CDC and the United Kingdom's Health Security Agency that examined the evidence for pandemic restrictions, and found there was little-to-none supporting masks or other interventions. Those documents were thrown out when officials panicked and caved to media pressure.
Even as it was abundantly clear that those policies were failing, as evidenced by huge surges of infection in states that followed Faucism, they did double down. Then tripled down. Then quadrupled down. All the while ignoring that their specific warnings or claims were proven false.
For example, Anthony Fauci said in 2020 that areas that listened to his advice would do better than those that didn't. Not, might do better. Not, we believe this is the best path forward. No, he said they without question, would do better if they mandated masks and shut everything down.
Instead, Fauci-following COVID extremist states like New York and New Jersey had far, far worse age-adjusted COVID mortality rates than Florida, where Ron DeSantis took the exact opposite approach.
This dismissive opening paragraph is bad enough, but of course, it gets worse.
The writer claims that another example of Fauci-ist failure, Sweden, isn't actually the "promising counterexample" that critics of pandemic restrictions make it out to be. Why? Because Sweden had higher excess mortality in 2020 than neighboring countries. Except, of course, we don't judge pandemic success or failure based on neighboring countries alone, because then the only comparison for Australia and New Zealand would be the ocean. And delusional extremists like the author of the article have frequently used Australia and New Zealand as examples of authoritarian success.
He then goes on to quote disgraced Biden White House failure Ashish Jha as an "expert."
"People love to cite Sweden as a success story of the hands-off approach," Jha told The Atlantic for their misinformation piece. "But if anything, it shows the exact opposite."
That is…just objectively false. It's so disconnected from any version of reality that exists in this universe that it's hard to believe either Jha or the writer actually listened to that sentence and thought it was worthy of saying, let alone including in an article. It's an embarrassment of historic proportions.
Sweden did not close schools. It did not mandate masks. It did not implement strict lockdowns. And it had literally the lowest excess mortality rate in Europe. This is insanity. And it shows how hard the COVID extremists will work to deny reality when it suits their purposes.
The writer also got a quote from Francis Collins, another failure of monumental proportions who disgraced himself and his profession during his reign of stupidity. Collins once again criticized The Great Barrington Declaration, a common-sense proposal that called to lift pointless restrictions harming millions and helping no one.
"If this proposal had been implemented, it would have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people," Collins said, once again lying as he so frequently does. "There was no way we could just sit around silently and let that happen."
Never mentioned, the deaths of tens of thousands of people from Collins and Fauci's delusional pandemic restrictions. Of course not, because that would mean taking responsibility for their inexcusable actions.
The writer for The Atlantic once again demonstrates his spectacular incompetence soon afterward, claiming that NPI's reduced infections, a conclusively false statement.
"Although state-level analyses find no pre-vaccine difference in COVID deaths, they do estimate that the most restrictive states experienced about 30 percent fewer infections than the least restrictive ones," he writes.
It's absolutely mind-boggling watching this revisionist history play out in the media yet again. New York, New Jersey and other anti-science states saw explosive case growth with mask mandates and other restrictions in the earlier part of the pandemic, when testing was nonexistent. We have no idea what the actual infection rate was in those states at that time period. We have no idea what true infection rates were later on.
And again, we can see that even when following Fauci-ist policies, states with mandates and restrictions had higher case rates at a statewide level, despite their NPIs.
Just imagine how many layers of editorial review this article had to go through, and not one of them thought to point out that the writer was misleading the audience with spectacular inaccuracies.
But what's the point of trying to defend the indefensible with purposeful misinformation? To justify the return of "public health measures" later on, of course.
"The revisionist narrative also has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people are convinced that public-health measures don’t work in the first place, they will be less likely to follow them, which, in turn, will render them even less effective."
Here's the problem with this author, The Atlantic and their extremist, anti-science views: they are so monumentally blinded by political ideology they cannot admit they were wrong. Their views are consumed by belief that experts who share their beliefs must be right, because having those beliefs makes them one of the good guys, unlike the "right-wing" contrarians who used evidence to prove them wrong.
Being "right-wing" makes you a bad guy, therefore easily dismissed. It's why the author is so comfortable using incorrect cherry-picked information to make false claims. Anything is justifiable in order to support the good guys and criticize the bad ones. Unfortunately for him, reality and data is on our side. We just have to hope that whoever is in office when the next media panic starts is smart enough to understand that.