By kues1 @Adobe Stock
Control Was the Aim
If Covid’s uniquely rapid spread was due to a lab modification, as accumulating circumstantial evidence suggests, that’s extremely important to know, alerts Holmen W. Jenkins in the WSJ to readers.
If you wonder why the Covid experience is playing no role in the election or slightly favors Mr. Trump, this is why. Americans by now have experienced the disease and realize it was far from unendurable. The lockdowns were needless destruction. Vaccine mandates were not going to stop the spread (though the vaccine itself reduced the risk of severe outcomes in vulnerable patients).
Bankrupt and Cowardly Institutions
(President Joe Biden) is now more associated with the failed medical establishment and post-Covid inflation than is Mr. Trump. The guidance of test, trace and quarantine was absurd and worthless when 90% of infections went unreported, continues Mr. Jenkins.
Mask mandates undoubtedly caused some vulnerable people to die because they believed a mask would protect them.
These steps were a political show as the virus made its inevitable way through the population, while politicians competed to suggest how valiantly they were trying to stop it.
Unbelievably Expensive and Wasteful
It was a handwaving show … And lacking was corrective reporting from our press. The essence of our folly was a fetishizing by the news media of a pathologically stupid “confirmed case count,” which made the virus seem more deadly, rare and stoppable than it was, justifying a tone of media blame against any politician who seemed insufficiently committed to stopping it.
In India, a large democratic country, cognitive realism led English-speaking reporters to relegate “confirmed case” reports to the bottom of news accounts, reports Mr. Jenkins.
Their reporting focused on antibody studies showing the real spread to be 20 or 30 times greater.
Mr. Jenkins uses “cognitive realism” to contrast with the U.S. press, “which picks sides among political leaders and filters reality through a need to valorize its favorites and vilify the baddies.”
The culmination was Joe Biden’s absurdly unscientific vaccine mandates, designed for a political end, to focus blame for Covid on the media stereotype of a GOP loyalist and Trump supporter.
In a democracy, voters get the government they ask for. If so, the most important Covid lesson is the one least mentioned.
A Political Gotcha Game
Read between the lines of today’s newsroom furors at the Washington Post, New York Times and other outlets. The mission of the press still seems dangerously up in the air. The job should be helping the public understand what disciplined factual reasoning can tell us about the world. It’s hard to believe our socio-political Covid outcomes wouldn’t have been a lot better if the media had done so.
