I thought the legacy media lost their remaining shreds of sanity when Donald Trump was elected. Turns out I underestimated them. Impossible as it might seem, with the outbreak of the Chinese Virus, they’ve gone even more barking mad.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, like US President Donald Trump, is having to fight a three-front war. First, as Morrison says, there is the public health crisis. But there is also an economic crisis: the reaction (or over-reaction) to COVID-19 is threatening to plunge the world into a full-scale depression.
The third front of the war is the legacy media. Time and again, at press conferences, Morrison has had to swat down media fear-mongering. Now, Trump’s own virus taskforce is giving the media a serve.
Dr. Deborah Birx, who serves as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, said during a press conference on Wednesday that the media has “frightened the American people” with salacious reporting surrounding the coronavirus outbreak.
Birx’s remarks come after leftist talking heads like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes have claimed that the coronavirus could kill 1% of the U.S. population, which is over 3.2 million people.
As we’ve seen amply demonstrated recently, journalists, as a rule, aren’t so good at maths (can’t count to ten while they’re typing, after all), as well as being only slightly less rational than a headless chicken. So it really shouldn’t surprise us when they start screeching that coronavirus is going to kill a million, billion, kajillion people.
That doesn’t mean that the grown-ups in charge have to put up with their childish hysteria, though.
“We have done some things that are horizontal across the country, but we are collecting data now in a county by county granular way. So, it’s like any epidemic, it’s not equal everywhere,” Birx said. “There are places that are very spared and places where there is more. We have a very vast country with a lot of capacity and a lot of infrastructure.”
“If you do these projections, when you got to those projections that said like in Germany and others that implied that 60% or 50% of the population would get infected, I want to be very clear, the only way that happens is that this virus remains continuously moving through populations in this cycle, in the fall cycle, and another cycle,” Birx continued. “That’s through three cycles with nothing being done[…]We’re really dealing with the here and now while we are planning for the future. And I think the numbers that have been put out there are actually very frightening to people.”
“But I can tell you if you go back and look at Wuhan and Hubei and all of these provinces, when they talk about 60,000 people being infected, even if you said, alright, well there’s asymptomatics and all of that, so you get to 600,000 people out of 80 million,” Birx added. “That is nowhere close to the numbers that you see people putting out there. I think it has frightened the American people.”
But the legacy media don’t want to hear none o’ that-there sciencey jibber-jabber.
CNN refused to air Birx speaking during the press conference and repeatedly cut away when she and Vice President Mike Pence spoke.
No doubt they had to cut to the latest update of what some celebrity said.
If you enjoyed this BFD article please consider sharing it with your friends.