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I don’t know that there’s much to say here beyond noting that he’s correct in every particular over the course of its seven-minute run time. Including, I think, his explanation at the end for why the pandemic was unusually deadly in the U.S. compared to most other countries.
He even goes to bat for Ron DeSantis on his pandemic performance vis-a-vis Andrew Cuomo’s.
Every point will be familiar to you if you’re a regular reader of this site or a consumer of right-wing media generally. We’ve noted the media’s “bad news bias” on COVID in the past, as well as lefties’ gross overestimate of how often infections result in hospitalization. But for the average HBO viewer, it must have felt revelatory.
Coincidentally, a few hours before this Maher monologue, Joy Reid and Anthony Fauci were on MSNBC proving his point:
“I am one of the fully vaccinated,” [Reid] said. “I’m fully Fauci’d. The question I have is are we really going to get to the end of it? Because, Dr. Fauci, at this point it’s political. There are people who are paranoid about you. They’ve decided they don’t trust you, they think you’re trying to have the government take over their lives or put nanobots in them and Bill Gates is going to physically control them if they get the vaccine. It isn’t just hesitancy, it’s paranoia. You have Tucker Carlson basically saying that you’re not telling the truth, if you’re vaccinated there’s no reason to wear a mask anymore. You have people screaming at store clerks because they don’t want to wear masks. This is not rational at this point, Dr. Fauci. So I wonder, what do we do about the irrational resistance to doing the basics, getting vaccinated and wearing masks.”
Fauci responded by largely echoing her concerns. He eventually conceded that people who were vaccinated could have unmasked gatherings in their own homes under some limited conditions, but stressed continued mask wearing outside the home.
It’s Reid and Fauci who are being irrational, said Reason’s Robby Soave in his post about the segment, not the vaccinated people who are taking off their masks. Who’s more irrational, the person who takes off their mask after getting both shots and now faces a .008 percent chance of infection or the person who’s had both of their shots and persists in behaving like this?
And we double mask in our family — the hospital style one with a cute cloth one on top. Will still be doing that for the foreseeable future. Here’s my fun @thereidout mask! pic.twitter.com/aJNTEuSn8I
— Joy-Ann Pro-Democracy & Masks Reid ? (@JoyAnnReid) April 11, 2021
She’s virtue-signaling, taking “safety first” common sense to a pathological extreme because she thinks it demonstrates how much she cares about others, particularly relative to her political opponents on the right. And because she and left-leaning media figures like her have huge platforms, their hypercaution ends up misleading average joes into believing that COVID is much, much, much deadlier than it is. Surely Joy Reid wouldn’t double-mask and avoid socializing even after being fully vaccinated unless the disease was so severe that it sends fully half the people who contract it to the hospital, right? I’ll let Maher take it from there.
I don’t want politics mixed in with my medical decisions. And when all of our news sources for Covid information have an agenda to spin us, you wind up with a badly misinformed population. #BreakingNews #ScaredStraight pic.twitter.com/xnPZOafziI
— Bill Maher (@billmaher) April 17, 2021
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