Liar, liar, revisited
We have to contend with not only Eric Feigl-Ding’s disinformation, Rebekah Jones’s grift, Nili Kaplan-Myrth’s ridiculousness, and media outlets that claimed a photo showed a packed beach in Raleigh (which is nowhere near the ocean), but also the lies of other COVID tragedists.
Lately, the U.S. has experienced an average of between 7,000 and 14,000 known COVID cases daily. But some screwball has produced a graph claiming it’s actually over 850,000. This is objectively false. He claims his past modeling has been used by Newsweek, Fortune, and Face The Nation. Given Fortune’s atrocious COVID record, it wouldn’t surprise me to find his disinformation in Fortune. Naturally, he wouldn’t show his work. He just expects everyone to take his word.
This graph of course has been grist for the mill of forever maskers. After it was posted on Twitter, at least one reply has demanded reinstatement of general mask mandates. Another reply has suggested that reopening society with 850,000 cases a day is “goalpost moving.” Somebody replied to this response just to double down by falsely claiming the current number is actually 1.2 million.
Fact is, even at its highest, the seven-day average has never reached 850,000. The highest case counts came during the Omicron winter of 2021-22, but this did not produce the most deaths, as earlier variants were far deadlier. By that winter, COVID deaths were well in decline. Yet numerous media outlets flat-out lied even about the one-day counts. Several outlets claimed the U.S. had over a million new cases on January 3, 2022. According to Corona Scanner, it was just a bit more than half that. Reuters claimed the U.S. counted over a million new cases on January 10. That too was a lie.
Though adverse effects of COVID were declining precipitously by then, the media kept COVD on the front burner, and that was when the worst mandates outside of actual lockdowns were in force. Meanwhile, while mandates interfered with people’s lives, COVID itself no longer did. I went to a public New Year’s celebration in Cincinnati to ring in 2022, and everyone was crowded together like logs. That was preferable to the garbage that was being broadcast from New York’s Times Square, where everyone was required to wear masks—though TV footage showed significant noncompliance with that. That it was a mandate in an outdoor space at all shows public officials’ complete misunderstanding of science and of the difference between indoors and outdoors, and it also shows they were digging in even a year after vaccines came out—showing they lied when they said they would lift mandates when vaccines came. This mandate also did not seem to apply to dignitaries up on stage. Rules are only for the little people.
If you want to talk about moving goalposts, the threshold for new restrictions is actually now the lowest it’s been since the pandemic started. Restrictions are still being added even in counties shown in green on the CDC map. In some cases, there doesn’t even have to be any COVID cases at all. Several Seattle area healthcare facilities just enacted new mask mandates solely because of the flu or RSV. These facilities’ thresholds for enacting new mandates based on these diseases is actually much lower than it is for COVID. Again, this is mission creep. Another example of this mission creep and the intent to make masks permanent: Mendocino County, California, just announced it is requiring healthcare workers to wear masks for seven months a year—forever—citing the flu.
It’s not even clear what metrics are being used at some institutions. Hospitals keep citing COVID numbers to add new mandates, yet the CDC map shows their entire region in green. Last year, a major healthcare network in my area said it would only enact a mask mandate if certain counties in the region went orange on the map. When these counties did not go orange, this network instituted a mandate anyway. You could almost sense the disappointment among its board of directors when no counties went orange.
This is in addition to the two recent weeks when the CDC refused to quickly correct falsified data for Hawaii County, Hawaii, which triggered a national park mask mandate. The data was finally fixed after each week in question, when it would no longer matter.
Anyone who has observed political campaigns since their youth should be frustrated to no end by this pattern of lying. You may still remember old political campaigns where a candidate lied repeatedly about a rival’s policy actions and there was no fact-checking on it by the media. Anyone who has been targeted for decades by their schools should be frustrated as well. Schools’ lies are often built on foundations of lies, built on sinkholes of more lies, built on caverns of yet more lies.
COVID catastrophists of today are the lying bullies that schools mollycoddled 35 years ago. This is not hyperbole, as I’ve seen their Facebook pages. We all remember the bullies who got away with everything while their victims were punished. They’ve become the COVID industrial complex of today. Thirty-five years is a long time to wait for justice for their past crimes, so we shouldn’t have to wait another 35 for justice for their recent crimes.