Much of the official COVID-19 narrative was untrustworthy—and became even more so as the lies became more blatant. In fact, the media reported contradictory information. There was no way two contradictory claims could be true. Trust in the media and public officials was shattered.
The official story said the eugenics-inspired lockdowns worked. That is a lie. There is simply no other way of putting it. In the spring of 2020, I looked at case numbers from Italy on Worldometer and noticed the number of new cases each day rose exponentially well after the lockdown was imposed. It was the same in the U.S. and in specific states like New York that had easily accessible data. In fact, weeks after lockdown was enacted, New York saw about 2,000 new hospitalizations per day, based on data from other sites.
Some actually said at the time with a straight face that reported cases were going up because of expanding availability of testing. Not true, because testing was still hard to come by—unlike later, when known cases actually did increase due to better testing. When testing really did increase after stay-at-home orders expired, they said case counts were growing because lockdowns were over. That too was fabrication. The numbers were no longer growing in most places. In places where they were, it was usually because they finally had enough testing to find more cases. The official story used contradictory arguments to suit the purpose at hand.
It’s like how when cases went up the following winter, they said it was because of people not following the rules. Yet these exact same people said flu cases cratered because people were following the rules so well. So were people following the rules or not? This is what George Orwell would have called doublethink—defined as simultaneously believing two contradictory ideas. This also set the stage for continuing COVID restrictions in the name of fighting other contagious illnesses—an instance of mission creep.
Similarly, when case numbers in the U.S. were experiencing a major wave of exponential growth in March 2020, lockdownists were quick to point out that there were actually far more cases than were counted, because testing was so limited. That was true. Months later, however, these same people contradicted themselves by insisting this time frame actually had no more cases than were counted, which meant we were nowhere near herd immunity, and therefore we could not loosen restrictions.
There was a very real correlation between tighter lockdown rules and more cases and deaths. New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island locked down hard, and as of May 2021, these states reported the highest cumulative death counts per capita in the United States. Alaska, New Hampshire, and Colorado generally had much shorter lockdowns and in some areas far less adherence to rigid COVID protocols—and these states had among the lowest death rates. (I went on a road trip in October 2020 and noticed that a Colorado motel was free of masks, even on the amazing and friendly clerk. However, this was not in one of the ski towns, where COVID totalitarianism was the official religion.) New Mexico had some of the harshest restrictions (even locking down twice), and as of August 2021, the state had the second-highest cumulative case rate in the country, according to estimates by the Covidestim project (a joint effort by Yale, Harvard, and Stanford). This correlation wasn’t found in just the United States. The Philippines and Peru both had some of the most severe lockdowns in the world, and this virus still barreled out of control. Peru banned anyone from leaving their home at all on Sundays. At one point, Peru had the highest death rate in the world after imposing what may have been the toughest lockdown in the world. In short, lockdowns don’t work.
In 2021, the Associated Press correctly reported that California’s outcomes were no better than Florida’s, while the latter state was known by then for having a much more lax approach to COVID and had a generally older population. It was also noted that Connecticut fared no better than South Dakota even though South Dakota not only had few restrictions but even had a marketing campaign to draw in tourists. This seems to be one of few times major American media got the facts right.
In August 2021, as Australian authorities continued issuing lockdowns while hamstringing vaccination efforts, American statistician Nate Silver correctly noted on Twitter, “Australia has most of its population under a lockdown so strict as to resemble the terms of house arrest and yet cases are still rising there. I’m not sure why it’s example of any sort of success that the US would want to emulate.”
Among the biggest lies is that restrictions would end if only we’d behave. After the chattering class said lockdowns would end the pandemic—which was false—they said we could get out of lockdown if we’d just wear masks. But after mask mandates were enacted, some jurisdictions closed businesses again or imposed new stay-at-home orders later. We were then told that if we got vaccinated and even subjected ourselves to mandatory vaccine passports, lockdowns and masks would both end. That was another shattered promise. In fact, mask orders later seemed to become tougher by the day. Even now—three years after the introduction of vaccines—there are still vestiges of all of these restrictions still out there. Some counties in California have just recently issued permanent mask mandates that will apply five to six months of each year in perpetuity.
Even coverage of lockdown opposition was a lie. Around mid-April 2020, protests began taking place all over the U.S. that appeared to demand reopening, but I was wary of this. I normally would have welcomed such protests with open arms, but—rightly or wrongly—I felt I had good reason to be leery of involvement by right-wing groups. I feared that the events were largely recruitment tools by right-wing reactionaries rather than effective protests against lockdowns. My interpretation of these protests may seem strange now, but the perception that there was extensive right-wing involvement drove me away. It also seemed odd that they held one of their biggest rallies in North Dakota, one of very few U.S. states that did not issue a stay-at-home order. In any event, the media portrayed right-wingers who attended these events as the face of all lockdown opponents. In doing so, they unfairly linked everyone who opposed lockdowns with retrograde rightist bluster. That was irresponsible, malicious, unconscionable behavior by news outlets and was nothing short of deliberate journalistic malpractice.
I regret that people with cooler heads didn’t protest right away, but it took time to overcome the shock of something as idiotic as stay-at-home orders. On April 28, I suffered a pulmonary embolism that was 100 percent caused by this shock. I literally had a feeling of heartbreak. Our failure to protest immediately doesn’t excuse the media portraying all lockdown dissidents as far-right town criers.
I also don’t want to look down upon someone just because they attended these protests. Some are people we know—or once knew. After they were bossed around by lockdownists who showed no concern for them, it’s easy to see why they might have joined any event that seemed to reinforce their view. But, as lockdowns were executed by a smug managerial class against a beleaguered working class, I hoped for something better.
The media also lied about the motive of a man who planned to attack a Missouri hospital. They claimed he was angry over lockdowns, but that was a flat-out lie designed to smear lockdown critics.
Writing in the Nation in May, Michael Massing said that during the pandemic, “the comfortable class” was “insulated from the concerns of the working class.” Massing noted that lockdowns were “applied uniformly” throughout New York state even though much of the state had seen very few cases. Yet politicians made little mention of any dissent or job losses, and Andrew Cuomo gave a smug, out-of-touch reply to a reporter who asked him about these losses.
Although that article correctly blasted elites’ arrogance, much of what appeared in the Nation regarding the pandemic was typical pop-up media junk. The Nation had fallen quite a bit even before the pandemic—like when it abandoned its pledge not to endorse political candidates who supported the Iraq War—but because it was a historically left-leaning magazine, bad articles on the pandemic did get some pushback in the comment section.
Remember “flatten the curve”? Our rulers didn’t stick to that either. “Flatten the curve” was the idea that we should try to keep the case count low so hospitals would have enough capacity. There was an assumption that most people would eventually catch the novel coronavirus. Medical ethics dictate that you have to work with the tools you have and not wait for things like vaccines that could have never come, so we had to assume most would catch it. The stated goal was to make sure people didn’t catch it all at once. I can appreciate this goal—but not the methods selected by our overlords, who said lockdowns would accomplish this goal. They also said that once we knew hospitals would not be overwhelmed, lockdowns and all other major restrictions would be lifted. That too was a lie. The only place in the U.S. where hospitals seemed to be overloaded was New York City. When the burden in New York eased and it was clear that no other American regions were likely to be overwhelmed, lockdowns still weren’t lifted. “Flatten the curve” went straight down the memory hole. The goalposts were moved again and again. Once the curve was flat, a new goal was to provide more testing. Some observers said the U.S. could drop all restrictions if at least 900,000 tests per day were administered. The country blasted past this number, yet restrictions continued. Another new goal was a sustained decline in new cases. Most states met this goal, and—big surprise—restrictions continued. The next goal was the introduction of a vaccine. There was no guarantee this would ever happen. It did happen in December 2020, but even that wasn’t enough! The next goal was to wait for a vaccine for children. On and on it goes. It’s closed schools, closed businesses, and masks forever. “Two weeks to flatten the curve” became an eternity, despite the lies that it was just temporary.
It’s like the Peanuts strips where Charlie Brown would try to kick the football and Lucy would yank the ball away.
Hospitals themselves aren’t blameless either. In the years since lockdowns, they’ve fretted about not having enough space to handle outbreaks. But they have done absolutely nothing to add more space. They also fired nurses who didn’t get vaccinated—then complained about a shortage of nurses. Many public health officials remained predictably bad, exemplified by Utah’s Dr. Angela Dunn and others. Dunn grumbled that Utah had “maxed out” its COVID testing capacity. If this was true, it was partly because she hadn’t done anything to improve it, even though there was plenty of time to do so by then. Other Utah officials then claimed that the lack of testing ability meant actual cases were more than official numbers showed—despite no solid evidence of it—and used that to justify supporting tougher mandates. Because of this wild assumption, Dunn issued a new mask mandate for Salt Lake County—in January 2022. This mandate was based on cases that were never proven to exist. That new mandates were still being issued a year after vaccines came out is proof that officials lied when they said vaccines would lead to the lifting of mandates. There is no ambiguity about it.
In brief, most people in the spring of 2020 considered it ridiculous to wait for a vaccine to go back to normal, but that’s when the idea started being tossed around. After the vaccine arrived, our rulers said that just because we got the vaccine didn’t mean we could return to normal. They always told us to hang on just a little bit longer—when they knew all along it would be much longer. Deborah Birx essentially admitted this in her memoir. Regarding “flatten-the-curve guidance” she helped concoct, Birx wrote, “Getting buy-in on the simple mitigation measures was just the first step leading to longer and more aggressive interventions.”
Continued restrictions make absolutely no sense, because so many people now have some form of immunity. Herd immunity is working. Plus, children have been at minimal risk from COVID all the while but have faced the toughest restrictions. Shootings, car crashes, drownings, and even heart disease were actually a much greater risk for children. The CDC even said, “The risk of complications for healthy children is higher for flu compared to COVID-19.” Do we close schools for two years over the flu? We can’t even protect our children from school shootings, but schools were closed for a year or two over COVID?
This of course does not count for the inequitable distribution of vaccines. In the U.S. and elsewhere, some ethnic and economic groups were more likely to have access to vaccines than others. Then again, the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines is a different matter entirely, which I plan to touch on later in this series.
It seems as if officials are actually aiming for a “zero COVID” policy. After almost four years, one can reasonably expect the number of new deaths from COVID to toboggan downward—and it has. But officials act as if they can eliminate every case, which is futile. Yet even they can’t possibly believe reduced cases can be accomplished with lockdowns and mandates.
Even if the plan was to wait only until there was a vaccine before ending restrictions, what was the plan supposed to be if no vaccine ever came?
The mishandling of the pandemic by the state of Illinois is a perfect illustration of the shifting goalposts. As J.B. Pritzker not only criticized but demonized those who opposed COVID rules (even after the hypocrite initially opposed the same rules), his handling was just as incompetent as most other governors. During his stay-at-home order, Illinois released a five-phase reopening plan. It wasn’t much of a plan though. Phase 5 was considered post-pandemic and was supposed to have no restrictions—but the plan said Illinois wouldn’t enter this stage until a vaccine came out. At the time, it was considered outright laughable to wait anywhere near that long. Guess what? When the vaccine came out, Illinois still didn’t enter Phase 5. The whole state just languished.
State Rep. LaShawn Ford told WBGZ radio that it was time for the legislature to fight back. The Chicago Democrat said of the governor’s dictatorial actions, “I don’t like it.”
Months later, the state shoehorned in a “bridge phase” between phases 4 and 5. State officials said Illinois would finally enter the “bridge phase” when certain goals were met. When these metrics were met—you guessed it!—Illinois still was not moved into the “bridge phase.”
When Illinois finally entered Phase 5, guess what? COVID rules still weren’t all dropped! The state was in a post-pandemic phase—and could never advance further—yet draconian rules remained in place. In fact, many of the old rules that had been dropped were later reinstated, so Illinois had almost as many restrictions as it ever had.
Pritzker also once falsely claimed that the positive rate in neighboring Iowa was 50 percent.
The point at which people move on with their lives is called the pandemic’s social end. For many, this came as early as late April or early May 2020. Photos appeared of California beaches and New York’s Central Park that showed people gathering like normal times—which shows that there could be two extremes of adherence in the same locale. Police in Ludlow, Kentucky, posted on Twitter:
“Do not contact us because groups are congregating in the Parks.
“Ludlow Police WILL NOT be enforcing people’s decisions to not social distance.”
Yet restrictions in some areas became worse after many had moved on, and some jurisdictions wouldn’t let it go three years later! It’s not just strange. It’s downright grotesque. In addition, some California beaches were inexplicably closed again over Fourth of July weekend, and some whiners actually called police on people using the beach.
One of the biggest lies—which played perhaps the biggest role in shattering trust in the media—surrounded the reopening of beaches. When Jacksonville, Florida, reopened its beaches, a photo showed up on some news sites of what appeared at first glance to be the newly open beach. The beach was absolutely packed. There had to have been tens of thousands of people there. Fear was expressed about a whole new COVID wave caused by the beach permitting such a crowd. But if you looked closely, there were mountains in the background, and Florida has no mountains. PolitiFact revealed that the photo was actually from Rio de Janeiro during a 2013 visit by Pope Francis!
How can we trust the media after it was caught claiming a 2013 photo from Brazil was a 2020 photo from Florida? This wasn’t even the first time something like this happened: After 9/11, some media outlets dredged up an old video of a Middle Eastern street festival and claimed revelers were celebrating the attacks. How could we trust the media after that?
You just cannot trust a single word the lockdownists say.
Months later, they were dumb enough to pull the exact same stunt again. This time, they used the Rio de Janeiro photo and claimed it was in Raleigh, North Carolina—even though Raleigh is nowhere near the ocean. How stupid do they think we are?
Another news outlet dredged up the previous year’s footage of a crowded beach at Lake Tahoe. Authorities used that scene as an excuse to close almost all the beaches there—causing visitors to crowd into a very small area. Then authorities had the nerve to criticize beachgoers for that.
One of the biggest factors to encourage lockdowns in March was a terrifying photo of coffins lined up, reportedly in Bergamo, Italy. It turned out it was actually from an unrelated event on the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2013.
In March 2021, investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald exposed a mind-blowing act of deception by MSNBC’s Joy Reid. Reid posted a 2019 photo of a crowded Miami area beach—and claimed it was a new photo. That came several years after Reid made a post on her blog attacking gay men by saying they were “attracted to very young, post-pubescent types.” Reid claimed her blog was hacked, but an analysis discredited her claim.
Writing in Mother Jones, Kevin Drum exposed other photographic deceptions. Drum wrote that some photos of crowds posted on other websites were deliberately deceitful, as they used a lens that made it appear as if people were too close together. This was a rather brave revelation by Mother Jones standards. The magazine had abandoned us years before the pandemic by printing right-wing drug warrior propaganda. It usually wasn’t any better during the pandemic, running a laughable piece titled “Anti-Vaxxers Have a Dangerous Theory Called ‘Natural Immunity.’ Now It’s Going Mainstream.” That article actually argued that infection did not produce immunity, and that anyone who said it did was an anti-vaxxer. Anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of medicine knows that many viruses confer some amount of immunity. The real anti-vaxxers were those who denied natural immunity, for both vaccines and natural immunity can result in herd immunity. Considering that piece, it’s surprising that Mother Jones actually exposed deceptive photos.
A piece by Edwin F. Ackerman in the left-leaning Jacobin magazine blasted the media’s dishonest coverage of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s COVID response, which was more lenient than many other countries. The article said the coverage “has been terrible.” However—unlike the media—WHO officials repeatedly praised Mexico’s response. The country did not issue a nationwide lockdown because officials knew it could not be sustained for very long. Of course, other countries’ officials knew it too but just didn’t care.
Much of what was published on Daily Kos was factually wrong—and they knew it. As sites like Daily Kos were historically liberal, they did of course get some pushback in the comment section. But dissenters often found themselves hounded off. The site’s founder and proprietor Markos Moulitsas claimed in a diary that Sweden had the highest COVID death rate in the world. That was a lie. I felt my heart breaking when Moulitsas lied to us like this, as I once admired his work. Sweden had a much lower death rate than many other countries, including elsewhere in Europe. Lying to your loyal readers is a hell of a way to treat us, Markos. In early May 2020, a news story blasted across the media about a new projection that said the U.S. would see an unprecedented spike in COVID cases and deaths within weeks. That projected uptick did not happen, and the Hill and the Washington Post both debunked the story, as it was leaked from an internal model that was not intended as a prediction. Johns Hopkins University, which worked on the study with the Department of Homeland Security, confirmed that the document was not meant as an official forecast. Rather, it was intended for FEMA to plan for a wide range of occurrences.
After the story was discredited, a Daily Kos regular posted at least two separate diaries spreading it in order to justify continuing lockdowns. Both diaries gravitated to the site’s front page. Even if the model was meant to be a prediction, since when do “progressive” sites not question the DHS?
This phony story was also grist for the mill of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The story led the IHME to recalibrate its model—which was endlessly cited by health officials—to forecast a much higher number of deaths. Despite the IHME’s alarmism, I usually considered its graphs of past data to be pretty accurate—until later in the pandemic when the graphs inexplicably began saying the number of recent deaths was much higher than it really was. It was as if the IHME was just pulling numbers out of its ass.
As this was going on, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb admitted to Face The Nation that the rigid lockdowns “didn’t work as well as we expected.” This makes the Kos Kids’ demands for continuing restrictions look even more out of step.
Another time, Moulitsas falsely claimed Sweden was the only country in the world with no lockdown. In another sad episode, one of the Kos Kids “corrected” a defender of Sweden by citing the Daily Telegraph, a right-wing British newspaper. Daily Kos users also absurdly called Sweden’s policy “Stalinesque” and “Naziesque” and compared it to the policies of Joseph Goebbels and North Korea.
In another effort to weaponize the crisis, another Daily Kos diarist had the nerve to argue with a study that found that the virus had been circulating in the U.S. months before anyone knew it. The diarist’s argument was that herd immunity was too far off to lift restrictions. In other words, that writer was disputing a scientific study as an excuse to extend lockdowns. Later studies also indicated the virus had spread early in the U.S.
That’s not to say the entire Daily Kos community was completely out of step. A reader in Sweden posted occasional diaries giving accurate, detailed accounts of the Swedish approach and praising it. He said that misunderstandings about this approach were being spread by the governments of China and Russia. Much of that followed China’s kidnapping of writer Gui Minhai while he was visiting Thailand. In other words, much of the blogosphere was spreading Chinese Communist Party propaganda. Official Chinese media accused Sweden of giving up the fight against COVID. Much of the American blogosphere echoed this accusation. Whose side were they on?
One of the most ridiculous posts to appear on Daily Kos regarding this sorry chapter in history talked about the fact that Swedish politicians on the left favored more lax policies, while those on the right favored cracking down: “What I have found so stunning in all this is that the Left Wing in Sweden overnight started sounding much like Trump supporters and the Right Wing in Sweden sound just like Left Wing Democrats, it is like being in upside down bizzaro [sic] world.” No, the real story is that Sweden actually has politicians on the left—rather than the neoliberal hacks who make up the Democrats’ “leadership.” The Swedish right wing sounded like what I had expected from the American right wing. Then that diarist linked to a right-wing video and praised it. One of the replies to this diary was equally absurd, accusing leftist parties in many countries of becoming too close to Russian President Vladimir Putin—who was far from leftist.
Major nationwide TV outlets and newspapers often lied outright about COVID in ways that were even more brazen than what has been described so far. In many cases, it could be demonstrated without any ambiguity that these outlets’ claims were false. NBC (owned by the Comcast thought police since the early 2010s) claimed outright in a headline on its website that Puerto Rico’s draconian measures yielded good results, though in fact Alaska and many other jurisdictions were more lenient and saw a lower death rate. NBC ignored the fact that Puerto Rico had the advantage of being a tropical island but still saw a worse death rate than many other places. If NBC using a headline to parrot a falsehood whipped up by government officials isn’t propaganda, what is?
Similarly, WRSP-TV and KHQA-TV—both owned or operated by Sinclair—claimed flat-out in a headline in September 2021 that Illinois’s ongoing draconian mandates reduced case counts. That statement had no basis to back it up.
In June 2020, WRC-TV—owned by NBC (and by extension Comcast)—reported that Washington, D.C., was experiencing a record number of COVID cases. That was another out-and-out lie. On the date cited, the city reported 63 new cases—down from 93 just a week earlier. Perhaps more importantly, the number of COVID cases in D.C. hospitals fell from 338 to 197 in the two weeks after the city loosened its lockdown. Yet the hospitals were becoming overwhelmed by patients with conditions other than COVID, who were required to delay treatment during lockdown.
In March 2021, it was reported that a TV station in Memphis falsely claimed that case counts in Tennessee were on the upswing again. In reality, the state had just hit its lowest seven-day case count in nine months.
Also that month, CNN reported cases in the United States were going up, even though not only were they going down but the nation had the lowest seven-day positive rate in the year since the pandemic gained a foothold.
MSNBC reported in April 2021 that cases in the U.S. were rising. They were not. Worldometer and Corona Scanner confirmed that they were not.
USA Today laughably claimed in July 2021 that reported cases in the U.S. were more than the previous summer. Actually, the case count was one-third lower. More importantly, the death count declined by a much bigger margin.
Reuters reported at the time that deaths in the U.S. were surging—even though Worldometer confirmed that new deaths were the lowest since the pandemic began.
Sometime during this obscene period, Baltimore authorities launched their “Unmasking Kills” campaign. This “effort” featured a poster in which a subject’s mouth opened to reveal a gun pointed at the viewer. A caption below the image said there had been 32 million COVID deaths worldwide. That was another alarmist lie. At the time, it was actually about 3.5 million. Similarly, at a time when Minnesota had reported a total of about 2,000 deaths, some media outlets falsely reported it was 90,000. It amazes you how much the media lied to justify continuing draconian mandates.
The CDC falsely claimed the widely ballyhooed Delta variant was as contagious as chickenpox—a lie so egregious that it was debunked by NPR. The CDC later said the Omicron variant was three to five times as deadly as earlier forms of the virus—a statement that can easily be discredited just by looking at a graph of deaths. Much of the media ran with the ball on this.
The lies never stopped, and that includes the alarmist dreck from Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding. Even in a crisis marked by daily doses of alarmism, Feigl-Ding stood out. In one fawning TV appearance, he was described as a Harvard epidemiologist—though he was no longer affiliated with Harvard. As late as July 2021, Feigl-Ding claimed intensive care units in Iceland—a country that never had a national lockdown—were filling up with COVID patients. That was a lie. Iceland only had four people hospitalized for the virus at the time.
Also in July, somebody posted on Twitter that 500 children under 18 in the U.S. had died from the then-new Delta variant. That was a lie, yet this post was retweeted endlessly.
In August 2021, Fox-owned WTVT-TV in Tampa posted a Twitter message that blared, “A SURGE LIKE WE’VE NOT SEEN BEFORE.” It was accompanied by a piece about Florida hospitals and a photo of a hospital room with medical personnel in full gear desperately milling about. It turned out the photo was not from Florida. It was an old photo from Italy. Similarly, in March 2020, CBS had aired footage of an Italian hospital and claimed it was from New York. CBS blamed an editing error, but a week later, it aired this same footage and said it was from Pennsylvania.
Also in August, some pundit or professional shitposter said Nevada—after becoming the first state to adopt a new mask mandate in that post-pandemic phase—was now seeing the slowest growth in new cases. That wasn’t even close to the truth. The slowest growth was in Missouri—with no statewide mask order. The New York Times confirmed that it was indeed Missouri.
In September 2021, an Alabama official said one in five Americans had already died of COVID. This claim was so outrageous that it doesn’t even deserve to be dignified further. Yet it was repeated unquestioningly by Sinclair-operated WPMI-TV.
Just after America reached the Biden administration’s goal of having 70 percent of adults vaccinated, I saw some of the usual Facebook goblins trying to whip up support for some of their own favorite Nazi-like policies. I pointed out that the 70 percent mark had been reached and even provided a link to a news article. Then one of these bile-spewing ogres actually denied outright that this was true. Never try to argue with idiots.
One Monday, the CDC reported an absurdly high number of new cases for Florida over the weekend. It turned out they assigned the actual number of known cases to each of three days, so the number they reported was three times the real number. This was obviously intended to be grist for the mill of conspiracy theorists who had begun thinking anything to do with Florida was toxic. Established news outlets ran with the story. Even the Florida Department of Health had to correct the CDC on this.
USA Today claimed—August 2021 again—that the U.S. was suffering over 1,000 deaths per day again. That was a lie. The seven-day average at the time was actually 718. Days later, the AP—in a particularly scolding piece—falsely claimed it was over 1,100 a day. An online commenter said of the article, “These are the same people who have told us one wrong thing after another.”
A news site claimed in September that Utah had a seven-day average of over 14,000 new cases per day. It was actually about 1,400.
In October, the New York Times—which had become an increasingly arrogant defender of the “new normal”—was caught with its soiled Underoos down around its ankles lying about the number of American children hospitalized for COVID. The paper claimed 900,000 had been hospitalized. The actual number was about 63,000. After being caught in this lie, the Times was forced to run a correction.
That came over a year after the New York Times was criticized for an article containing multiple misstatements about Sweden’s COVID policies. It was revealed that the author of this article had called Sweden’s response a “crackpot strategy”, so it’s not like we could count on objectivity.
In another point in the crisis, when the U.S. reported under 700 pediatric deaths from COVID, some nobody on NBC claimed it was 146,000—over 200 times the real number.
In late 2021, after America had seemingly achieved herd immunity by its original definition, major news outlets either claimed the country was very close to herd immunity or would never reach it. Both can’t be true. Even sillier, some articles that said we would never reach herd immunity also said we should attempt it anyway and keep restrictions in place. If it’s hopeless, why even try?
In December 2021, some turgid simpleton on Daily Kos—which rested in ruins by then—falsely claimed the positive rate in Oklahoma was over 34 percent. It was actually 11 percent.
A Jimmy Dore webcast dated December 31, 2021, correctly reported that CNN lied about deaths from the relatively mild Omicron variant. CNN claimed to have confirmed the first Omicron death in the U.S., but in fact, health authorities in Harris County, Texas, could not confirm it. Dore said CNN wouldn’t even do the “gumshoe work” of confirming it.
A Dore video dated January 1, 2022, said NBC lied by claiming in a headline that the rate of pediatric hospitalizations for COVID had increased. NBC’s article did not mention until the ninth paragraph that most of these hospitalizations were with COVID but not actually because of COVID, as the COVID diagnosis was merely incidental to what they were actually hospitalized for. It’s like the time a man died in a motorcycle crash but the cause of death was listed as COVID. I posted a YouTube link to Dore’s video on Twitter, but Twitter deleted it almost immediately. More about Big Tech censorship later.
Nate Silver exposed a similarly misleading New York Times headline regarding hospitalizations in Puerto Rico.
In January 2022, the Miami Herald falsely reported that Florida was seeing the most COVID deaths since October 2021. According to Worldometer, the death rate there had actually been declining precipitously for weeks.
In February, the New York Times falsely claimed that the Omicron variant accounted for more American deaths than the Delta variant did. This claim was outrageous on its face.
In March, in an effort to whip up more fear, Gothamist incorrectly claimed that the Omicron variant was three to five times as deadly as early variants. This was one of the most bizarre and unfounded fibs of early 2022.
In April, the media continued to dig in on their lies and their egging on of public officials. In an attempt to justify continuing restrictions of the previous two years (which they had promised would be only “temporary”), they claimed case numbers were rising in places where it could be verified that they were not. A frustrated Reddit commenter noticed this and said in part:
“All I see in the news is cases are rising, cases are rising, cases are rising, and ad infinitum.
“And for some reason I see no increase when I check any statistics.
“STOP
“LYING”
This is in addition to the fact that cases were no longer even a good measure by then, because by that time, far fewer cases had severe outcomes.
Again, it wasn’t just the media lying. When the Transportation Security Administration again extended its thoroughly discredited mask mandate for mass transit in the U.S., the CDC said America’s seven-day average of new cases had increased since early April. Worldometer showed that it was in fact decreasing.
The Los Angeles Times said in mid-April that cases in California were increasing. That was a lie. Worldometer showed they were decreasing perhaps more rapidly than in the U.S. overall.
Also in April, CBS claimed the U.K. was seeing increasing cases—when in fact, case counts there were seeing the steepest decline in months. CBS looked especially stupid because the BBC correctly reported just hours earlier that cases were falling.
In May, MarketWatch said the case count in the U.S. was the highest since November 2020. That too was demonstrably a lie. It was only a fraction of the official numbers seen in January.
Also that month, USA Today claimed that immunity from the Omicron variant did not protect against other variants—another straight-up lie. The origin of this falsehood is as spurious as all the rest, as USA Today seems to have simply made it up out of whole cloth.
In another sorry May incident, KING-TV claimed that much of Washington state was in the “high” transmission category. That was misleading at best. Not a single county in the state was in the CDC’s “high” tier. The station’s report even showed the CDC’s map. The claim that much of the state was in “high” was based on a state-issued map that few people even used.
In June, ABC ran a story that said herd immunity was impossible. If this was true, this meant our efforts to achieve herd immunity had gone to waste. You could almost hear the COVID hall monitors bragging that it was just our tough luck that our sacrifices were all for naught. In reality, however, some level of herd immunity had already been reached. The more important point here though surrounds a photo from Times Square that Yahoo News included with the story. The caption said it was a recent photo showing the square bustling with pedestrians. However, some said the photo appeared to be doctored, as the sunlight was somehow hitting pedestrians from two different angles.
A New York City official who had been unusually supportive of lockdown culture was caught lying about matters other than COVID. He posted statistics boasting that the city was seeing a sharp dip in homicides—but it was pointed out that the statistics were false.
Also in June, the Cincinnati Enquirer ran a headline screeching, “Rising COVID-19 cases elsewhere in Ohio may hit Cincinnati next.” Cases in Ohio were actually dropping. No large increase in cases hit Cincinnati.
CBS and the Los Angeles Times said hospitalizations in Los Angeles County were increasing. This was false. KNBC-TV and KTLA-TV both correctly reported that they were holding steady.
In another June story, the Lexington Herald-Leader claimed all but 14 of Kentucky’s 120 counties were classed under the “high” transmission category on the CDC’s map. This was false, as there were actually only 19 in “high.”
Again in June, CNBC reported that America’s seven-day average for COVID deaths was about 80 percent higher than it actually was.
A July article that appeared on an “independent” British Columbia-based website said COVID reinfections were possible every two to three weeks, and that these infections conferred no immunity. That outrageous claim was then quoted by a Washington Post columnist—who subsequently told Twitter followers not to believe doctors who disagreed. A Reddit comment said the claim was “literally a series of lies. Just bald-faced, brazen fabrications with no source.” Writing for Slate, Tim Requarth also blasted the piece. Requarth assured, “The article was roundly criticized by numerous experts on Twitter as sloppy and error-ridden, and hyperbolic.” He concluded, “The seriousness of the pandemic speaks for itself, but manipulating a pandemic-weary public with despair-inducing lies isn’t the way to get them to listen.”
CBS ran with the lie, claiming the BA.5 subvariant “appears to be three to four times more resistant to antibodies.” A lie that appears to have originated with a little-known fly-by-night website almost instantly became a talking point among major media. This was also true of other matters even before the pandemic.
Many news outlets made such absurd leaps of logic that there’s no way they couldn’t be willfully lying instead of just making honest mistakes. A Washington Post editorial declared BA.5 to be the worst variant ever—even though the number of new deaths in the U.S. was the lowest in a year. Why was this variant considered the worst? According to the article, it was because it evaded the immune system—although there is no evidence this was true. If it evaded the immune system, why weren’t there more deaths? According to the article, that was because of immunity—the same immunity that the article said this variant evaded. The editorial displayed doublethink. In reality, the virus was evolving the way many other viruses do, which had been expected since the pandemic’s early days.
The lie about BA.5 was also yet another instance of the goalposts being moved. By that time, most countries had very few people who had never been infected by the novel coronavirus, so it’s fair to say the original herd immunity threshold of 70 percent had been shattered. Make no mistake, some deaths did occur, but an overwhelming majority of people who caught the virus suffered only mild symptoms (if any) and recovered completely, and the death rate continued to decline. It had been promised that herd immunity would mark the end of pandemic. Yet the fearmongering and threats of heightened police state tactics continued. A Twitter commenter noted, “In retrospect it is unsurprising that after basically everyone got covid and it was fine, the zero-covid crowd would pivot to ‘you’re going to get it several times a year and each time be worse than the last.’ ”
The rate that a virus or infection is transmitted can be expressed with the basic reproduction number—also known as the R0. The R0 is the number of new cases directly generated by one case. For example, an R0 of 2 means one infected person is spreading the virus to an average of two people. If the R0 is below 1, it means the virus is dwindling. This number also assumes no other people have immunity from vaccination or prior infection. Some viruses have a very high R0. For instance, the R0 of measles is 18, which would make it perhaps the most transmissible virus if it wasn’t for the immunity given by vaccines. During the BA.5 hype, Fortune reported that one of its selected “experts” said the R0 of SARS-CoV-2 had bolted to 18.6. This was demonstrably false, for a website that listed current COVID statistics for each U.S. state said the R0 in the states and territories ranged from 0.5 to 1.22.
Dr. Marcel Curlin of Oregon Health & Science University did not agree that BA.5 was the worst variant, citing data from South Africa. Oregon Public Broadcasting reported, “In recent weeks, some headlines have declared BA.5 ‘the worst variant,’ a statement Curlin says isn’t really accurate.” OPB correctly said BA.5 was “comparatively mild.”
A fact-check by Reuters confirmed that there was no evidence the Omicron variant was more infectious than measles or was the most infectious known virus. Reuters noted specifically that the 18.6 figure was incorrect.
CNN claimed at the time that the number of Americans with “long COVID” was growing by 100,000 per day. A Twitter commenter called this claim “patently false.”
In July 2022, an AP piece claimed the seven-day average of deaths in the U.S. was 55 percent higher than it actually was—489 versus 315. CNN—in a rare move—reported roughly the correct number. The point of the AP article was to scold readers that they should bunker down “until we get better vaccines”—even though three different vaccines had already been in use in the U.S. for over a year. This was well over two years since lockdowns came to America. A Reddit commenter had this reply to the article: “Don’t get pissy because people don’t want to wear masks that don’t work in JULY 2022 after being told in 2020 it was a temporary measure until a vaccine.” This commenter went on to write, “I’m tired of having my life ruined by their ‘simple common sense’ measures.”
The AP article also generated other critical responses, such as this from a nurse:
“Yeah, see that’s your problem: you already did ALL of that. People believed it the first time: that all the disruption was ‘temporary until we get vaccines.’
“Now you want to do it until ‘BETTER’ vaccines...which we all know now probably won’t be any better. The ‘experts’ may think they can keep rolling with the ‘until the finish line’ messaging, but the problem is that the public has now lived through 2.5 years of Two Weeks To Slow The Spread™, and we’ve seen there is no finish line. Anywhere.
“So yeah. Good luck with getting people to believe you when you keep regurgitating the same obvious bullshit; I’m a freaking NURSE, and I’ll never take public health seriously again. Sorry, you blew your entire field’s credibility on the first two years of lies.”
Also in July, KETV-TV in Omaha claimed a majority of American counties were in the “high” transmission category on the CDC map—which simply wasn’t true.
In August 2022, NBC claimed the seven-day average of COVID deaths in the U.S. was 477. That was a lie. Worldometer data showed it was 361.
Even as sensationalism continued to loom large, some criticized this scaremongering. Dr. John Swartzberg of the University of California, Berkeley, told the San Francisco Chronicle that some media outlets engaged in “pretty irresponsible reporting” about new variants. At the same time, NBC dug in on its COVID scaremongering over the variants.
American news outlets made huge leaps to link lockdown dissidents with unsavory characters or ideas. A few protesters during the original lockdowns may have been somewhat miswired, but by 2021, everybody was fed up. Yet the media still tried to make these links. Some reports that were ostensibly straight-ahead news stories were actually editorials, and some made demonstrably false claims. They often failed to ask the real questions, such as why schools expected perfect attendance during what should have been summer break. One piece accused a protester of trying to ruin a business by distributing its name and address, but what he actually did was give the shop free advertising. A business open to the public does not have privacy rights.
In October 2022, the New York Times ran a headline blaring that cases were rising, when they were not.
In November, CNBC claimed the U.S. was over 2,600 deaths per week. It was not. CNBC and Anthony Fauci claimed the country was averaging 400 deaths per day. The average was actually about 300.
In December, ABC reported that COVID cases were rising in Los Angeles County, though by that time, they were decreasing again. Even a graph with the article showed this. Plus, even the Los Angeles Times reported a decrease.
As late as that month, the New York Times was still claiming the novel coronavirus had a mortality rate as high as three percent—though it had been known for a long time that it was actually much, much lower.
Near the end of that month, the Sacramento Bee claimed COVID numbers were “spiking” in California. In fact, they were falling. At the same time, KTVI-TV said of cases in greater St. Louis, “The number of COVID-19 cases appears to be rising in the area.” Yet just below that paragraph on the station’s website was a graph that showed cases were dropping.
More doublethink: In the spring of 2023, CBS-owned KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh lamented that masks were coming off. The article said masks had reduced the flu and RSV to “almost zero.” That was after the media spent the entire winter hyping the flu and RSV to justify more mask mandates.
The New York Times ran a vicious hit piece against Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, saying that these two leading health researchers had declared in June 2020 that the pandemic was ending. Actually, they did not make this claim until July 2021.
When self-centered media simpletons weren’t lying outright, they misled viewers. For example, they would mention a higher case or death count without noting that it resulted from a backlog of cases over a major holiday. Throughout the crisis, they hyped case increases but ignored decreases. This was another act of deliberate journalistic malpractice.
Often when a new variant became dominant, it was endlessly noted that it escaped immunity better than the others. Of course it did. That’s why it was the dominant variant.
It wasn’t just blogs and major media that lied. It was politicians too. In 2021, Terry McAuliffe—the Democrats’ disgusting nominee for governor of Virginia—built his whole identity on COVID whoppers. He endlessly repeated what even the Washington Post called a “four Pinocchio” lie about COVID hospitalizations. McAuliffe also called his main opponent an “anti-vaxxer” on Meet The Press even though his opponent encouraged vaccination.
The CDC wouldn’t even let it go in July 2023, when it claimed the U.S. was seeing a new increase in COVID hospitalizations. That was another statement that was at odds with objective facts. In other words, it was a lie. The CDC’s own statistics showed hospitalizations had dropped. Deaths had even declined 20 percent in only a week.
In August—when the media was trying to whip up a new panic—USA Today said the newly found BA.2.86 variant was “not Omicron variant.” Wrong. It was in fact a descendant of Omicron.
Also in August, the Cincinnati Enquirer flat-out lied about COVID prevalence in the region. It said that every county except one in the area was in the “high” tier on the CDC’s map. In fact, every county was “low”, and no counties were “high” in the entire country.
Outrageously, Fortune claimed in September 2023 that case counts were as high as they were as during the peaks of 2020-21. This could be easily debunked by any other source.
Anthony Fauci was often accused of lying about the pandemic, but so-called fact-checking websites lied just as much about what he said. Fauci gave a 60 Minutes interview in March 2020 in which he discouraged masks. Some commentators replayed this clip for years afterward to show how inconsistent Fauci was. But one fact-checking website claimed Fauci never discouraged masks—even as this interview was in plain sight.
Even at the time of this writing, the media puts out contradictory information about COVID. These claims can’t all be true.
All of the lies and distortions documented here were designed to justify more lockdowns or other restrictions. Why should the media or our political class be trusted at all after they told so many lies to try to bring about more lockdowns?