The Real Covid Failure – WSJ

Mr. Biden is now more associated with the failed medical establishment and post-Covid inflation than Mr. Trump is. Test, trace and quarantine was absurd and worthless when 90% of infections went unreported. Mask mandates undoubtedly caused some vulnerable people to die because they believed a mask would protect them.

These steps were a political show as the virus made its inevitable way through the population, while politicians competed to suggest how valiantly they were trying to stop it.

It was a hand-waving show, unbelievably expensive and wasteful. And lacking was corrective reporting from our press. The essence of our folly was a fetishizing by the news media of a pathologically stupid confirmed case count, which made the virus seem more deadly, rare and stoppable than it was, justifying a tone of media blame against any politician who seemed insufficiently committed to stopping it.

I noted at the time another large democratic country with an English-language press, India, where cognitive realism led reporters to relegate confirmed case reports to the bottom of news accounts. Their reporting focused on antibody studies showing the real spread to be 20 or 30 times greater.

I choose the phrase cognitive realism to contrast with the U.S. press, which picks sides among political leaders and filters reality through a need to valorize its favorites and vilify the baddies. The culmination was Joe Biden s absurdly unscientific vaccine mandates, designed for a political end, to focus blame for Covid on the media stereotype of a GOP loyalist and Trump supporter.

In a democracy, voters get the government they ask for. If so, the most important Covid lesson is the one least mentioned. Read between the lines of today s newsroom furors at the Washington Post, New York Times and other outlets. The mission of the press still seems dangerously up in the air. The job should be helping the public understand what disciplined factual reasoning can tell us about the world. It s hard to believe our socio-political Covid outcomes wouldn t have been a lot better if the media had done so.

via www.wsj.com

Holman Jenkins.

To this I would add the promotion of panic by the media and scientists too. We were told by scientists with great credentials that Covid would have a fatality rate of 5 percent and perhaps more. I did the math and could barely believe what the results would be. And all this the result of the crime of the century. But we can expect the guilty, or some of them, to be held accountable about the same time you can take a high speed train from Fresno to Bakersfield.