The Left Is Now Scaremongering The COVID ‘Delta Variant
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/29/the-left-is-now-scaremongering-the-covid-delta-variant/
COVID-19 infection rates are down. Deaths are down. Vaccinations are up. So what’s the response from the left? It continues a desperate attempt to scare the public and blame Republicans.
The left’s bellwether outlet, the New York Times, perfectly sums up this agenda with a story headlined “Red America’s COVID Problem,” in which the Times writes that “COVID remains a serious threat to unvaccinated adults, especially those middle-aged or older” and that it’s rising in Trump-supporting areas of the country where vaccination rates, they say, are lower.
“No wonder, then, that the number of new cases keeps falling in Biden counties, while it has begun to rise in Trump counties,” the Times goes on.
The Washington Post’s increasingly leftist “conservative” columnist Jennifer Rubin declares that “Red states are dangerous to America’s health.”
President Joe Biden is doing his level best to keep the country in a state of panic, warning that the new “Delta variant” is more easily transmissible and potentially deadlier and, he claims, is “especially dangerous for young people.”
The congenital liar Anthony Fauci chimed in as well, saying that “the Delta variant is currently the greatest threat in the U.S. to our attempt to eliminate COVID-19.”
Fauci, you may have noticed, has changed the goalposts again, from “flattening the curve” to eliminating COVID-19 entirely – which is an impossibility, but would let him play dictator for years to come.
Despite the claims, it’s not clear that the “Delta variant” is as deadly as the earlier variant. One analysis points out that hospitalizations declined in the United Kingdom as the Delta variant spread in that country increased.
And just because it might be more transmittable, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s as threatening as the original version of the novel coronavirus. As Thomas Lifson, writing for American Thinker, pointed out, “The virus, like all life forms, wants to reproduce to survive. But if it kills off its hosts, it can’t do so. That’s why as viruses mutate, they become less lethal and more transmissible.”
In any case, the situation is nothing like it was last year.
As Bloomberg reports, “Even for the worst-afflicted states, the situation is nowhere near as alarming as what residents survived as recently as February; absolute numbers of hospitalizations remain far lower.”
So why the attempt to keep the fear factor dialed up to 11? In our view, the reason is simple. The left wants to maintain its grip on the public, and score additional political points against Republicans. Too bad there’s little factual evidence to back that up.
The New York Times, for example, cites Missouri as a case study in how supposedly Trump-fueled skepticism of the vaccine has lead to a substantial growth in cases. But while the increase might look big on a percentage basis, it’s off a tiny base, and will likely go back down soon enough. (When that happens you can bet the New York Times won’t follow up.)
Plus, what these miscreants conveniently ignore is the fact that the four states with by far the highest COVID death rates are bluest of blue states: New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. And states with significant recent drops in new cases include solidly red states such as Montana, Wyoming, Louisiana, West Virginia, Indiana, Idaho, and Alaska.
Sure, given the vast amount of data out there, it’s not hard to slice and dice it to make a political point. But that’s purposely ignoring the forest while pointing to a few branches on the trees.
There’s another point worth making. Those who contract COVID have only themselves to blame, given that vaccines are now universally available. So if some people would rather risk getting the disease (and the immunity it provides for the future) than risk a potential side effect from a COVID vaccine, what business is it of politicians?
What we have here is nothing more than the left trying to continue to flog COVID for its own political gain – either to maintain control over the public by needlessly scaring it or to “own” Republicans by wrongfully blaming them.
Either way, it’s an unseemly spectacle.
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