Jenin Younes on media coverage of the coronavirus

[T]he media’s dereliction of duty is beyond evident.  As [Karina] Reiss and [Sucharit] Bhakdi observe, broadcasters and the press became “servile mouthpieces of the government” and never “critically questioned” the “disturbing images and frightening numbers."  Incidentally, a letter recently published by 200 Belgian scientists similarly criticized the media: “[t]he relentless bombardment of numbers, unleashed on the population day after day, hour after hour, without indicating those numbers, without comparing them to flu deaths in other years, without comparing them with deaths from other causes, has induced a true psychosis of fear in the population.  This is not information, but manipulation.” 

As an avid consumer of the New York Times, the New Yorker, and NPR, I can attest to the media having operated no differently in the United States.  Apart from a few pieces in early March that questioned the wisdom of the course we had set upon, there was no serious discussion and no debate, at least in the left-leaning media, and anyone who dissented from the prevailing view was and continues to be dismissed as stupid or selfish.  Early on, and without any nuanced analysis, Sweden was deemed a failure.  The public has been beset by such terror, driven by anecdotes often presented without context, that it has become virtually impossible to dispel these many misconceptions using facts, figures, and logic.

~ Jenin Younes, "Disease Panic vs. Medical Reality," AIER.org, September 28, 2020

Gregory van Kipnis on Covid-19 death statistics

As COVID-19 deaths mounted, not a word was officially spoken about where they were occurring [residents of long-term medical care facilities accounted for 53% of all COVID-19 deaths]. Fear was stoked that it was a population-wide epidemic. We should ALL lock down.

What a costly mistake, a mistake that continues to this day. Governors and mayors with fresh data insights into the truth still want to be central planners and determine which businesses can re-open and to what degree, who should still shelter or socially distance. They send out teams to draw circles in the grass defining where groups can camp out and place police monitors in all the parks to warn people to stay within the circles. At this point they are just imaginary prisons, but they are prisons.

Madness, sheer madness. 

Though that is an easy and superficial observation to make, what is really unsaid, and not easy to admit, is that large numbers of politicians and bureaucrats have revealed their true nature. Speeches decorated with declarations of “better safe than sorry” and “planning is better than no planning” reveal they are authoritarians by nature; central planners of the worst kind. 

In conclusion, the relevant death rate for policy purposes has been obscured. The consequence has been inappropriate policies. They have resulted in a bizarro world of highly restricted commercial functioning and immense economic destruction, alongside no evidence that lives were saved and growing evidence of second-tier loss of life resulting from lockdown.  

~ Gregory van Kipnis, "Focus on the Covid-19 Death Rate," AIER.org, May 24, 2020