Fear mongering and stupidity from The New York Times.
A rant caused by the insanity seen in much of society
This was said today:
“But Omicron may cause such a large increase in cases that it will nonetheless overwhelm hospitals, many of which are already near capacity.”
Every part of this statement is an intentional lie designed to instill fear and make the public accepting of increasing authoritarian, intrusive government actions that have no basis in medical science. It is all about controlling lives, not saving lives.
Here are my critical views:
1. Every bit of real-world evidence shows that omicron variant does NOT pose a serious health threat. Some of the smartest pandemic experts correctly see omicron more as a sign of the end of the pandemic than a worsening of it.
2. Looking at case data is sheer stupidity. The fear mongering already has compelled more people to get tested even though they have no symptoms of concern. Then they get PCR testing, most of which is run at too high a number of cycles and, therefore, produces false positives.
3. There are no good data showing hospitals being overwhelmed; they should not be because omicron does not produce really serious health impacts requiring hospitalization. That is another scare tactic.
4. Meanwhile, the government has totally failed to get large and free supplies of fast, home antigen test kits out to the public. This is the best way to quell fears and control need to go to hospitals because they will show that the vast majority of people have enough innate or natural immunity to keep them infection free.
5. Of course the government still does not tell the public about early home treatments that could quickly fix infection, and also that can be used as a prophylactic to prevent infection. Latest research showed that ivermectin is very effective.
6. Most importantly, all available, enormous information from all over the planet shows that COVID vaccines do not stop people from getting infected, even after booster shots. [Have you noticed all the top politicians fully vaccinated and with booster shots getting breakthrough infections?] So, real world evidence shows vaccine ineffectiveness, but the government keeps pushing vaccine shots and ignoring the great many harmful health vaccine impacts, including deaths. Even worse, governments increasingly PUNISH those who intelligently chose not to get vaccine shots or boosters. Treat them as second-class citizens, ignore the two-thirds of the population with natural immunity from prior infection; do not credit them with better immunity than vaccine immunity. What a corrupt, stupid government and public health system we have!
I now see President Biden as the new near-dead and utterly stupid captain of the Titantic circling around the toilet water, working successfully to flush our society down into the sewer system operated by an army of incompetent and corrupt idiots.
I am still waiting for the much-needed revolution. For that we need more people with working critical thinking skills.
The NYT and various other "prestigious outlets" are very clever about portraying themselves as bastions of journalistic integrity. The signs that they are anything but are there for all to see and, in the case of the NYT at least, have been for many decades.
Many of us remember very well the NYT's role in driving our country to war with Iraq through its endless repetition of the WMD myth. I went back to reread its tepid apologies for participating in that disaster. Here is a striking example for anyone wondering what their "exit strategy"' will be for their current journalistic lying and misbehaviors (From a 2004 "self-reflective editorial," written to mollify readers angry with the paper for drumming up support for the Iraq War):
"But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge."
And then, they wrote "Hey, everyone! Quick, look at the pretty butterfly!" (Or something like that.)
Of course, that the NYT did such a despicable thing should not have come as a surprise. In 1988 Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman wrote the 400 p. Manufacturing Consent, in which they documented a sickening succession of cases where the NYT and the other "prestigious outlets" effectively inflamed some stories, while suppressing others, in ways that overwhelmingly favored corporate elites and government. To quote the book, the news media "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion." Chomsky and Herbert make a very careful and thorough case. But I save the NYT"s most despicable moment for last.
In the early 1930s Stalin, eager to impress the world with the Soviet Union's rapid industrialization under communism, cleared all the grain and food out of Ukraine to be sold on the open markets to fund his scheme. Between 3 and 10 million people lost their lives to this artificial famine. The NYT's Walter Duranty, stationed in Moscow during this time, shilled for Stalin and convinced the readership that nothing bad was happening, that Stalin was doing amazing things, that if anything it was sometimes necessary to break a few eggs to make an omelet. We know that Duranty knew about what was happening in Ukraine but chose instead to loan Stalin the NYT as a propaganda platform. However, in this case the NYT didn't feel a need to apologize. To really get a feel for the evil that the NYT organization is capable of: in the '00s Ukrainian activists banded together to demand that the NYT forfeit Duranty's Pulitzer for his Soviet coverage. (Yeah, Duranty won a Pulitzer for that.) NYT fabricated some kind of marble-mouthed technicality as an excuse for not giving back the Pulitzer.