The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Truth or Satire? It’s Getting Harder to Tell

Posted on | May 8, 2021 | Comments Off on Truth or Satire? It’s Getting Harder to Tell

January headline from The Babylon Bee:

CNN Unveils New Format
Where Hosts Just Watch Fox News
And Yell At It

This is awfully close to describing what’s happened to CNN in recent months. Once Biden was inaugurated, the network lost its raison d’être of producing anti-Trump propaganda. Ratings for CNN have evaporated since January and, unable to excite their audience with live performances of journalistic fellatio on Biden (metaphorically speaking), they devote hours every day to critiquing whatever is on Fox News.

 

So the other night, Tucker Carlson raised questions about whether the number of deaths from COVID-19 vaccine are being underreported. He didn’t advance any “conspiracy theory” during that segment, or make claims that could justify Sanjay Gupta’s unhinged reaction:

“What he’s done is he’s basically looked at these open-system adverse reporting systems and said ‘hey look, this suggests that 30 people a day are dying of the vaccine.’ Absolutely not true,” Gupta said on CNN’s New Day.
“The problem is that it continues to stir up this vaccine hesitance or outright vaccine reluctance . . .

Hey, Dr. Gupta: Maybe “vaccine hesitance” doesn’t really matter, but do you really care about Fox News viewers? No, I’m pretty sure you would be very happy if they all died tomorrow. So please spare us your concern-trolling. My thought all along has been that the draconian lockdown regimes and mandatory mask-wearing orders, at best, didn’t do much to stop the pandemic and quite possibly made it worse. Anyone can examine the state-by-state per-capita death rates and see that there is no clear correlation between the severity of the lockdown regimes and the relative safety of populations. Florida is doing just fine, despite all the hate directed at Gov. DeSantis by CNN and other liberal media outlets that prophesied a catastrophe in the Sunshine State.

Nor do I think that Biden’s manic insistence that everybody must get vaccinated before life can return to normal is justified. Those who are most at risk from the virus — the elderly and those with health issues that might make them vulnerable — need to get vaccinated, but healthy young people have a near-zero risk of death from COVID-19 and it’s senseless to require them to get the vaccine. So whatever Tucker Carlson says about vaccine-related deaths probably won’t make much difference one way or another in the overall fight against the pandemic. What it may do (and this is what the Democrats who run CNN are really concerned about) is give some Republican lawmakers encouragement to resist efforts by the Biden administration to make vaccination mandatory.

They’re telegraphing their punches, so to speak. Everybody with two eyes and a brain can see where they’re going with this. At some point — maybe in a few weeks, maybe this fall — the Biden administration will claim that too many people are refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and measures will be introduced to punish the unvaccinated. At that point, questions about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine will be very relevant to arguments by opponents of these punitive measures.

I’m not an “anti-vaxxer,” but I do know people who’ve had adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine — not fatal, but not pleasant. Lots of people say that second Moderna shot is a doozy. Personally, I’ve never gotten the flu vaccine, because I have confidence in my immune system. About once a year, I get the common cold or the flu — it’s hard to tell the difference, and I don’t really care which it is — and I go through a few days of coughing and wheezing before I get better. No big deal. Except for that one time in 2011 when I came down with a serious case of bronchitis that scared me pretty bad, I just refuse to worry about stuff like that. Worrying causes stress, and stress is bad for your immune system.

Speaking of worrying, maybe the folks at CNN should worry less about what Tucker Carlson says and worry more about why their network sucks. “Fake news” is the Enemy of the People, you know.




 

Category: CNN

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