Cartoon – 2020 Sanitized Santa
Category Archives: Pandemic
Cartoon – 2020 State of the Union
Cartoon – Essential vs Non Essential
Darkest days ahead
Rare words from an incoming president: “Our darkest days in the battle against COVID are ahead of us, not behind us,” President-elect Biden warned this afternoon during remarks in Wilmington.
Why it matters: Biden is promising to tell America the truth, which includes the reality of many more horrific months, no matter who is in charge.
- If we’re lucky, vaccinations will provide enough herd immunity to allow some normality by this summer or fall.
Another blunt reality: Most of the benefits in the $900 billion coronavirus rescue package expire months before America has any hope of being back to normal.
- The $300 boost for unemployment benefits expires in March.
- The new $284 billion round of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) is meant to last 3 months.
- There’s no new funding earmarked for state and local governments.
The other side: There’s funding for schools and childcare and mass transit and vaccination distribution, which helps bail out the above from those obligations.
- The entertainment sector got $15 billion, helping out theaters and museums and live entertainment venues.
- $600 checks will start showing up next week for individuals making under $75,000 (phases out for incomes above that), with an extra $600 per child.
The bottom line: Georgia’s Jan. 5 Senate runoffs could be the difference between a big stimulus under Biden, or more trouble for parts of the U.S. hospitality sector.
2 men shot up a California strip club with an AK-47 after refusing to wear masks, authorities say. Now they face life in prison.
When a group of friends rebuffed multiple demands to wear masks inside the Sahara Theater in Anaheim, they were kicked out of the strip club in the early-morning hours of Halloween for not following the state’s coronavirus restrictions.
The men returned to the gentleman’s club in their Honda sedan shortly thereafter, but they were not looking to reenter and keep the party going. Instead of masks, they brought with them an AK-47 to shoot at the outside of the establishment, according to authorities, firing 15 rounds from the car and hospitalizing three people with gunshot wounds.
Nearly two months later, the Anaheim residents were arrested in what police described to The Washington Post as the most extreme anti-mask incident in the city to date.
On Monday, Edgar Nava-Ayala, 34, and Daniel Juvenal Ocampo, 22, were charged with three felony counts of attempted murder with premeditation and deliberation, three felony counts of assault with an assault weapon, and one felony count of shooting into an occupied building. A third man, Juan Jose Acosta-Soto, 20, was charged with three felony counts of assault with an assault weapon and one felony count of shooting into an occupied building.
All three men have pleaded not guilty to the charges, according to a news release from the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.
If convicted on all charges, Nava-Ayala and Ocampo face a maximum sentence of life in prison. Acosta-Soto faces a maximum prison sentence of more than 17 years.
Anaheim Police Sgt. Shane Carringer told The Post that the men were arrested Thursday, adding that the city avoided a near-tragedy with the dozens of people inside the club at the time of the Halloween shooting.
“It is nothing short of a miracle that no one was killed,” Carringer said. “There were over 30 people in there and these guys are suspected of indiscriminately firing at innocent bystanders with a high-powered rifle.”
The strip club shooting is just one example in a long line of mask disputes that have led to gunfire since the start of the pandemic. In May, a Family Dollar security guard in Flint, Mich., was killed after telling a customer that her child had to wear a mask to enter the store. That same month, a maskless San Antonio man who was denied entry on a bus proceeded to shoot and critically injure a passenger who had confronted him for not wearing a face covering, authorities said. In August, a Pennsylvania man was charged after allegedly opening fire outside a cigar shop that had asked him to wear a mask.
The district attorney’s office said Nava-Ayala and Ocampo were “escorted out of the club because they refused to wear face coverings.” When the three men came back in their car at about 1:35 a.m. on Oct. 31, police say Nava-Ayala ripped off 15 rounds from an AK-47 into the Sahara Theater.
Three people — two employees and a customer — were hospitalized and suffered minor to moderate injuries to their upper body that were not life-threatening. A fourth person was wounded, but refused medical attention, Carringer said.
In California, gentlemen’s clubs like the Sahara Theater are allowed to operate if they provide food, which would classify them as a restaurant instead of a bar or live entertainment venue.
A manager with the club declined to comment to The Post, saying, “All the info is out there.”
Carringer said Anaheim police had worked “nonstop” for about six weeks as part of the investigation to track down the three men, arresting them in different locations Thursday. None of them had a significant previous record before the shooting, he said.
“In Anaheim, this is as close as we’ve gotten to a mass shooting,” Carringer said.
Nava-Ayala, Ocampo and Acosta-Soto are being held at the Orange County Jail on $5 million bail each. Their attorneys did not immediately return a request for comment early Tuesday.
Antarctica reports first COVID-19 cases
Three dozen people at a Chilean army base in Antarctica have reportedly tested positive for the novel coronavirus, marking the first time a case has been recorded on the continent.
Base General Bernardo O’Higgins Riquelme is one of 13 active Chilean army stations in Antarctica, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation noted.
Sky News reports that of the 36 who tested positive, 26 are members of the Chilean military while the rest are maintenance workers.
Though there are few people in Antarctica, the implications of the coronavirus diagnoses could be significant. The number of people in Antarctica fluctuates widely throughout the year depending on the season, Sky News notes, with around 1,000 in the winter and about 5,000 in the summer.
“The detection of cases of COVID-19 in Antarctica will impact upon a range of areas, from planning and logistics of human activity on the continent through to high-level decision-making back home,” Hanne Nielsen of the the University of Tasmania told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
“The presence of COVID-19 in Antarctica also has implications for local wildlife, with the threat of humans transmitting the virus to other species,” Nielsen added.
Chile’s government announced on Sunday that doses of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine could begin being administered as early as next week. The vaccine was reportedly approved by Chile’s health regulators last Wednesday.
Chilean President Sebastian Pinera said the first doses would be limited to health care workers, as many governments have done, with the goal of sending out 20,000 doses by the end of the month.
Despite health warnings, holiday travel has already set a record for busiest weekend of the pandemic
Pre-Christmas air travel surpassed 1 million daily passengers nationwide for three consecutive days this weekend — breaking the record for most weekend travelers of the pandemic and outpacing Thanksgiving numbers that assumed that title and worried health experts last month. The 3.2 million passengers screened Friday, Saturday and Sunday mark the only time during the pandemic that over 1 million air travelers were seen three days in a row.
The influx in air travel undercuts health officials’ guidance for Americans to stay home this holiday season. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidance earlier this month that discouraged travel and urged those who need to travel to acquire coronavirus tests before and after their journey.
The next two contenders for busiest travel weekends were those before and after Thanksgiving, Transportation Security Administration spokesperson Daniel Velez said in an email. Pre-Thanksgiving weekend saw 3,052,139 travelers, with the following weekend logging 2,961,120.
On Saturday, TSA spokesperson Lisa Farbstein noted the upswing in passenger volume on Twitter and shared images of TSA agents sanitizing security checkpoints, which have new touchless procedures and glass barriers between travelers and staff.
Farbstein also reminded passengers that they are permitted to bring up to 12 ounces of hand sanitizer through security — more than the standard three-ounce limit that applies to other liquids — during the pandemic.
“Until further notice, passengers may bring one container of hand sanitizer up to 12oz in carry-on bags,” the TSA said in a tweet. “Expect containers to be screened separately, which may add time to the checkpoint screening experience.”
While the amount of people flying every day is still consistently less than half of the same numbers seen last year before the pandemic began, the influx marks a steady increase in the frequency of days in which travel volumes surpass 1 million daily passengers. Since March, there have been a total of eight days that saw more than 1 million screenings: One occurred in October, four in November, and three have been recorded so far this month.https://a85aee93c838e6222057ae0ce825fc95.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
“Travel can increase your chance of spreading and getting COVID-19. Postponing travel and staying home is the best way to protect yourself and others from COVID-19,” the CDC said in updated guidance on Dec. 2. For those who do plan to travel, the agency recommends getting tested one to three days before the trip and three to five days afterward. It also says to “reduce non-essential activities for a full 7 days after travel, even if your test is negative.”
Those unable to acquire a test, the guidance says, should “reduce non-essential activities for 10 days after travel.”
Christmas travel numbers are likely to plummet in some other countries, like England, where officials have imposed lockdowns and banned holiday gatherings because of a fast-spreading strain of the coronavirus. Canada and some nations in Europe have moved to ban travel from England through Christmas.https://a85aee93c838e6222057ae0ce825fc95.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
While the strain has not yet been reported in the United States, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) on Monday called for the country to follow suit and ban travel from the United Kingdom.
“Right now, this variant in the U.K. is getting on a plane and flying to JFK,” Cuomo said on a conference call with reporters. “We have about six flights a day coming in [to JFK airport] from the U.K., and we have done absolutely nothing.”
Here’s what we know about the new European coronavirus mutation
A flurry of European travel restrictions announced Sunday over worries about a fast-spreading new variant of the coronavirus have spurred curiosity and concern that the mutation could infect Americans.
After officials in the United Kingdom said Saturday that the variant first identified there was spreading 70 percent faster than others, Google searches about the mutation have spiked. But American public health experts and federal officials say that although it appears that the variant may be more contagious, it is not any more dangerous than others already detected in the United States.
“I don’t think there should be any reason for alarm right now,” Adm. Brett Giroir, who has been in charge of testing, told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.”
Variations to the virus are nothing new, and experts say the novel coronavirus does not mutate as much as influenza, meaning it is less likely that a vaccine would need to be developed every year to keep up with the new strains.
Still, much about this variant remains unknown, such as whether it is a new strain — a functionally different version of the virus.
“The take-home message for right now is that we need to get more information,” said Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious-diseases specialist at the Medical University of South Carolina. “In the meantime, we all need to really double down on our public health measures — wearing masks, remaining physically distanced, avoiding crowds of people.”
Where has the variant been detected?
In September, U.K. researchers discovered the variant’s prevalence when they collected samples from infected people in southeastern England. It seemed to spread quickly.
“This lineage came up quite rapidly,” Nick Loman, one of the researchers and a professor of microbial genomics at the University of Birmingham, told The Washington Post.
Since then, Australia, Denmark and the Netherlands have identified cases of the variant in their countries, the World Health Organization told the BBC. On Sunday, Italian officials announced that a patient returning from Britain “in the last few days” was in isolation after scientists detected the mutation.
In South Africa, health officials said Sunday that a version of the virus similar to the U.K. variant has been found in 80 to 90 percent of samples analyzed since mid-November.
Is the variant already in the United States?
The virus has not been detected in the United States, but officials are watching for developments in Britain, Giroir told Stephanopoulos.
Although guidance from federal agencies discourages traveling to Britain, the United States has not banned travel from there.
“I really don’t believe we need to do that yet,” Giroir said.
But New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) pointed out Sunday that it would take only one flight to the United States to spread the mutation, urging federal officials to restrict travel.
“Right now, this variant in the U.K. is getting on a plane and flying to JFK,” Cuomo said on a conference call with reporters.
However, Kuppalli warned that little is known about the effectiveness of a ban, referring to instances in which people rushed to airports and congregated in long lines trying to travel before restrictions were put into effect earlier in the pandemic.
It is also not entirely certain whether the virus gained its foothold in the southeast of England because of its altered genetic markers or through super-spreading events, said Scott Gottlieb, a former head of the Food and Drug Administration.
“It seems like this new strain is more contagious,” Gottlieb said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “It doesn’t seem to be any more virulent, any more dangerous than run-of-the-mill covid. The next question is: Will it obviate our natural immunity?”
Will the authorized vaccines still be effective against this variant of the virus?
As of now, experts say there has been no indication that the variant is resistant to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines authorized by the FDA.
“There is no reason to believe that the vaccines that have been developed will not be effective against this virus as well,” Vivek H. Murthy, President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for surgeon general, told host Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “The bottom line is if you’re at home and hearing this news, it does not change what we do in terms of precautions.”
Although the vaccine remains out of reach for most Americans, following guidance such as social distancing and wearing masks remains the most practical way to prevent transmission.
Los Angeles hospitals brace for care rationing
Several hospitals in Los Angeles County are preparing for the possibility of restrategizing care delivery in the coming weeks amid growing COVID-19 hospitalizations, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles County reported 6,018 COVID-19 hospitalizations Dec. 20 — a 2.5 percent increase from the day prior — with 1,198 patients in ICUs, according to the state’s data dashboard. Statewide, 17,750 patients are hospitalized with COVID-19, 3,710 of them in ICUs.
The LA Times obtained a document recently circulated among physicians at the four county-run hospitals that outlines resource allocation in crisis situations. The guidelines call for physicians to save as many patients as possible versus trying everything to save a patient, meaning those less likely to survive will not receive the level of care they would have otherwise. L.A. County Health Services Director Christina Ghaly, MD, told the LA Times that the guidelines were not in place as of Friday night.
California activated its “mass fatality” program last week, which coordinates mutual aid across several government agencies when more deaths take place in a period of time than can be handled by local coroner or medical emergency personnel, NPR reports.
Nearly all of the state is under stay-at-home orders, with residents prohibited from gathering with anyone outside their immediate household.
“I have yet to see any clear signals that things are slowing down, and I’m very concerned about the next two months,” Timothy Brewer, MD, an epidemiologist with UCLA Health, told the LA Times. He said UCLA Health is scheduling several infectious disease specialists to be on call at any time, and the biggest issue is that hospitals may quickly run out of providers who can administer ICU-level care.
Lie of the Year: Coronavirus Downplay and Denial
A Florida taxi driver and his wife had seen enough conspiracy theories online to believe the virus was overblown, maybe even a hoax. So no masks for them. Then they got sick. She died. A college lecturer had trouble refilling her lupus drug after the president promoted it as a treatment for the new disease. A hospital nurse broke down when an ICU patient insisted his illness was nothing worse than the flu, oblivious to the silence in beds next door.
Lies infected America in 2020. The very worst were not just damaging, but deadly.
President Donald J. Trump fueled confusion and conspiracies from the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic. He embraced theories that COVID-19 accounted for only a small fraction of the thousands upon thousands of deaths. He undermined public health guidance for wearing masks and cast Dr. Anthony Fauci as an unreliable flip-flopper.
But the infodemic was not the work of a single person.
Anonymous bad actors offered up junk science. Online skeptics made bogus accusations that hospitals padded their coronavirus case numbers to generate bonus payments. Influential TV and radio opinion hosts told millions of viewers that social distancing was a joke and that states had all of the personal protective equipment they needed (when they didn’t).
It was a symphony of counter narrative, and Trump was the conductor, if not the composer. The message: The threat to your health was overhyped to hurt the political fortunes of the president.
Every year, PolitiFact editors review the year’s most inaccurate statements to elevate one as the Lie of the Year. The “award” goes to a statement, or a collection of claims, that prove to be of substantive consequence in undermining reality.
It has become harder and harder to choose when cynical pundits and politicians don’t pay much of a price for saying things that aren’t true. For the past month, unproven claims of massive election fraud have tested democratic institutions and certainly qualify as historic and dangerously bald-faced. Fortunately, the constitutional foundations that undergird American democracy are holding.
Meanwhile, the coronavirus has killed more than 300,000 in the United States, a crisis exacerbated by the reckless spread of falsehoods.
PolitiFact’s 2020 Lie of the Year: claims that deny, downplay or disinform about COVID-19.
‘I always wanted to play it down’
On Feb. 7, Trump leveled with book author Bob Woodward about the dangers of the new virus that was spreading across the world, originating in central China. He told the legendary reporter that the virus was airborne, tricky and “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
Trump told the public something else. On Feb. 26, the president appeared with his coronavirus task force in the crowded White House briefing room. A reporter asked if he was telling healthy Americans not to change their behavior.
“Wash your hands, stay clean. You don’t have to necessarily grab every handrail unless you have to,” he said, the room chuckling. “I mean, view this the same as the flu.”
Three weeks later, March 19, he acknowledged to Woodward: “To be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down. Because I don’t want to create a panic.”
His acolytes in politics and the media were on the same page. Rush Limbaugh told his audience of about 15 million on Feb. 24 that coronavirus was being weaponized against Trump when it was just “the common cold, folks.” That’s wrong — even in the early weeks, it was clear the virus had a higher fatality rate than the common cold, with worse potential side effects, too.
As the virus was spreading, so was the message to downplay it.
“There are lots of sources of misinformation, and there are lots of elected officials besides Trump that have not taken the virus seriously or promoted misinformation,” said Brendan Nyhan, a government professor at Dartmouth College. “It’s not solely a Trump story — and it’s important to not take everyone else’s role out of the narrative.”
Hijacking the numbers
In August, there was a growing movement on Twitter to question the disproportionately high U.S. COVID-19 death toll.
The skeptics cited Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data to claim that only 6% of COVID-19 deaths could actually be attributed to the virus. On Aug. 24, BlazeTV host Steve Deace amplified it on Facebook.
“Here’s the percentage of people who died OF or FROM Covid with no underlying comorbidity,” he said to his 120,000 followers. “According to CDC, that is just 6% of the deaths WITH Covid so far.”
That misrepresented the reality of coronavirus deaths. The CDC had always said people with underlying health problems — comorbidities — were most vulnerable if they caught COVID-19. The report was noting that 6% died even without being at obvious risk.
But for those skeptical of COVID-19, the narrative confirmed their beliefs. Facebook users copied and pasted language from influencers like Amiri King, who had 2.2 million Facebook followers before he was banned. The Gateway Pundit called it a “SHOCK REPORT.”
“I saw a statistic come out the other day, talking about only 6% of the people actually died from COVID, which is very interesting — that they died from other reasons,” Trump told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Sept. 1.
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, addressed the claim on “Good Morning America” the same day.
“The point that the CDC was trying to make was that a certain percentage of them had nothing else but just COVID,” he said. “That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of COVID didn’t die of COVID-19 — they did.”
Trump retweeted the message from an account that sported the slogans and symbols of QAnon, a conspiracy movement that claims Democrats and Hollywood elites are members of an underground pedophilia ring.
False information moved between social media, Trump and TV, creating its own feedback loop.
“It’s an echo effect of sorts, where Donald Trump is certainly looking for information that resonates with his audiences and that supports his political objectives. And his audiences are looking to be amplified, so they’re incentivized to get him their information,” said Kate Starbird, an associate professor and misinformation expert at the University of Washington.Weakening the armor: misleading on masks
At the start of the pandemic, the CDC told healthy people not to wear masks, saying they were needed for health care providers on the frontlines. But on April 3 the agency changed its guidelines, saying every American should wear non-medical cloth masks in public.
Trump announced the CDC’s guidance, then gutted it.
“So it’s voluntary. You don’t have to do it. They suggested for a period of time, but this is voluntary,” Trump said at a press briefing. “I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.”
Rather than an advance in best practices on coronavirus prevention, face masks turned into a dividing line between Trump’s political calculations and his decision-making as president. Americans didn’t see Trump wearing a mask until a July visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
Meanwhile, disinformers flooded the internet with wild claims: Masks reduced oxygen. Masks trapped fungus. Masks trapped coronavirus. Masks just didn’t work.
In September, the CDC reported a correlation between people who went to bars and restaurants, where masks can’t consistently be worn, and positive COVID-19 test results. Bloggers and skeptical news outlets countered with a misleading report about masks.
On Oct. 13, the story landed on Fox News’ flagship show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” During the show, Carlson claimed “almost everyone — 85% — who got the coronavirus in July was wearing a mask.”
“So clearly (wearing a mask) doesn’t work the way they tell us it works,” Carlson said.
That’s wrong, and it misrepresented a small sample of people who tested positive. Public health officials and infectious disease experts have been consistent since April in saying that face masks are among the best ways to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
But two days later, Trump repeated the 85% stat during a rally and at a town hall with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie.
“I tell people, wear masks,” he said at the town hall. “But just the other day, they came out with a statement that 85% of the people that wear masks catch it.”
The assault on hospitals
On March 24, registered nurse Melissa Steiner worked her first shift in the new COVID-19 ICU of her southeast Michigan hospital. After her 13-hour day caring for two critically ill patients on ventilators, she posted a tearful video.
“Honestly, guys, it felt like I was working in a war zone,” Steiner said. “(I was) completely isolated from my team members, limited resources, limited supplies, limited responses from physicians because they’re just as overwhelmed.”
“I’m already breaking, so for f—’s sake, people, please take this seriously. This is so bad.”
Steiner’s post was one of many emotional pleas offered by overwhelmed hospital workers last spring urging people to take the threat seriously. The denialists mounted a counter offensive.
On March 28, Todd Starnes, a conservative radio host and commentator, tweeted a video from outside Brooklyn Hospital Center. There were few people or cars in sight.
“This is the ‘war zone’ outside the hospital in my Brooklyn neighborhood,” Starnes said sarcastically. The video racked up more than 1.5 million views.
Starnes’ video was one of the first examples of #FilmYourHospital, a conspiratorial social media trend that pushed back on the idea that hospitals had been strained by a rapid influx of coronavirus patients.
Several internet personalities asked people to go out and shoot their own videos. The result: a series of user-generated clips taken outside hospitals, where the response to the pandemic was not easily seen. Over the course of a week, #FilmYourHospital videos were uploaded to YouTube and posted tens of thousands of times on Twitter and Facebook.
Nearly two weeks and more than 10,000 deaths later, Fox News featured a guest who opened a new misinformation assault on hospitals.
Dr. Scott Jensen, a Minnesota physician and Republican state senator, told Ingraham that, because hospitals were receiving more money for COVID-19 patients on Medicare — a result of a coronavirus stimulus bill — they were overcounting COVID-19 cases. He had no proof of fraud, but the cynical story took off.
Trump used the false report on the campaign trail to continue to minimize the death toll.
“Our doctors get more money if somebody dies from COVID,” Trump told supporters at a rally in Waterford, Mich., Oct. 30. “You know that, right? I mean, our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say, ‘I’m sorry, but, you know, everybody dies of COVID.’”
The real fake news: The Plandemic
The most viral disinformation of the pandemic was styled to look like it had the blessing of people Americans trust: scientists and doctors.
In a 26-minute video called “Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind COVID-19,” a former scientist at the National Cancer Institute claimed that the virus was manipulated in a lab, hydroxychloroquine is effective against coronaviruses, and face masks make people sick.
Judy Mikovits’ conspiracies received more than 8 million views in May thanks in part to the online outrage machine — anti-vaccine activists, anti-lockdown groups and QAnon supporters — that push disinformation into the mainstream. The video was circulated in a coordinated effort to promote Mikovits’ book release.
A couple of months later, a similar effort propelled another video of fact-averse doctors to millions of people in only a few hours.
On July 27, Breitbart published a clip of a press conference hosted by a group called America’s Frontline Doctors in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Looking authoritative in white lab coats, these doctors discouraged mask wearing and falsely said there was already a cure in hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.
Trump, who had been talking up the drug since March and claimed to be taking it himself as a preventive measure in May, retweeted clips of the event before Twitter removed them as misinformation about COVID-19. He defended the “very respected doctors” in a July 28 press conference.
When Olga Lucia Torres, a lecturer at Columbia University, heard Trump touting the drug in March, she knew it didn’t bode well for her own prescription. Sure enough, the misinformation led to a run on hydroxychloroquine, creating a shortage for Americans like her who needed the drug for chronic conditions.
A lupus patient, she went to her local pharmacy to request a 90-day supply of the medication. But she was told they were only granting partial refills. It took her three weeks to get her medication through the mail.
“What about all the people who were silenced and just lost access to their staple medication because people ran to their doctors and begged to take it?” Torres said.No sickbed conversion
On Sept. 26, Trump hosted a Rose Garden ceremony to announce his nominee to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court. More than 150 people attended the event introducing Amy Coney Barrett. Few wore masks, and the chairs weren’t spaced out.
In the weeks after, more than two dozen people close to Trump and the White House became infected with COVID-19. Early Oct. 2, Trump announced his positive test.
Those hoping the experience and Trump’s successful treatment at Walter Reed might inform his view of the coronavirus were disappointed.
Trump snapped back into minimizing the threat during his first moments back at the White House. He yanked off his mask and recorded a video.
“Don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it,” he said, describing experimental and out-of-reach therapies he received. “You’re going to beat it.”
In Trump’s telling, his hospitalization was not the product of poor judgment about large gatherings like the Rose Garden event, but the consequence of leading with bravery. Plus, now, he claimed, he was immune from the virus.
On the morning after he returned from Walter Reed, Trump tweeted a seasonal flu death count of 100,000 lives and added that COVID-19 was “far less lethal” for most populations. More false claims at odds with data — the U.S. average for flu deaths over the past decade is 36,000, and experts said COVID-19 is more deadly for each age group over 30.
When Trump left the hospital, the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 was more than 200,000. Today it is more than 300,000. Meanwhile, this month the president has gone ahead with a series of indoor holiday parties.
The vaccine war
The vaccine disinformation campaign started in the spring but is still underway.
In April, blogs and social media users falsely claimed Democrats and powerful figures like Bill Gates wanted to use microchips to track which Americans had been vaccinated for the coronavirus. Now, false claims are taking aim at vaccines developed by Pfizer and BioNTech and other companies.
- A blogger claimed Pfizer’s head of research said the coronavirus vaccine could cause female infertility. That’s false.
- An alternative health website wrote that the vaccine could cause an array of life-threatening side effects, and that the FDA knew about it. The list included all possible — not confirmed— side effects.
- Social media users speculated that the federal government would force Americans to receive the vaccine. Neither Trump nor President-elect Joe Biden has advocated for that, and the federal government doesn’t have the power to mandate vaccines, anyway.
As is often the case with disinformation, the strategy is to deliver it with a charade of certainty.
“People are anxious and scared right now,” said Dr. Seema Yasmin, director of research and education programs at the Stanford Health Communication Initiative. “They’re looking for a whole picture.”
Most polls have shown far from universal acceptance of vaccines, with only 50% to 70% of respondents willing to take the vaccine. Black and Hispanic Americans are even less likely to take it so far.
Meanwhile, the future course of the coronavirus in the U.S. depends on whether Americans take public health guidance to heart. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projected that, without mask mandates or a rapid vaccine rollout, the death toll could rise to more than 500,000 by April 2021.
“How can we come to terms with all that when people are living in separate informational realities?” Starbird said.
HENRY KOTULA 