Remember when it was supposedly President Trump “stoking fear” about an issue that the media swore wasn’t real, didn’t exist, and lived only in the imaginations of hysterical idiots?
That was before the pandemic when Trump frequently described the hordes of destitute migrants pouring across the southern border as vessels for rapists, human traffickers, violent criminals, and drugs, all of which are true, should you happen to check with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
If you watch CNN today, you’ll find that fear is suddenly your best friend.
Back then, the media called it a lie that was intended to frighten people. But now that Trump is urging people not to live in a constant panic over the coronavirus, it’s journalists who want you to live in a perpetual state of fear that at any moment, the virus is ready to fill your lungs and take you out.
Shortly before being discharged from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Monday, Trump tweeted, “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta reacted in absolute horror. Tapper called Trump’s remarks “disrespectful” and told his audience, “It’s OK to be afraid of COVID, and it’s OK that it’s dominating your life.”
“Jake, this is so disrespectful,” Gupta said. “I’m not even sure I can think about this in some sort of cogent way … It’s incredibly disrespectful.”
He went on to say it’s “not true” that people shouldn’t live in fear, adding, “What does that mean, ‘Don’t be afraid of it?’ I mean, first of all, it’s a contagious disease that kills people, so what are you going to be afraid of if you’re not afraid of something like that? … It’s gross, it really is.”
Gupta was right. He couldn’t be sure that he could talk about this in some sort of cogent way, and he didn’t.
This is the man whom CNN puts forth as the staid voice of sound medical expertise, but he’s urging people to stress out, keep their blood pressure high, and worry constantly about a virus whose death rate is quite low.
Thanks to rapid advancements in medicine and scientific understanding of the virus, the number of deaths we’re seeing on a weekly basis is about one-third of what it was five months ago. The age of the typical person who succumbs to the virus is in the upper 70s.
Pandemics are no fun, and every death is a tragedy. But the numbers in no way lend themselves to the mass hysteria that people like Gupta and Tapper encourage.
We know people have died. People die every day. There’s an open debate about how many deaths we might have prevented with earlier action or different policies, but the fact remains that the number of people who actually die after becoming infected is very small, and those cases are virtually exclusive to those complicated by underlying conditions, such as heart disease or immunodeficiency.
Healthy people under the age of 70 face far less risk from infection. And people under the age of 55 face a mortality rate that’s less than 1%.
Why, then, is fear something that should be encouraged? Since when is fear a good choice?
The media tell us not to be scared of unknown numbers of illegal immigrants in the country, many who have violent criminal records. So, why should we fear a virus that we now know passes through the overwhelming majority of people without incident?
They want you to be scared, not because you should be, but because they have a political agenda that now calls for it.
