Which has been worse on TV recently — the constant yammer about the coronavirus or the 2020 Democrats reciting their talking points? Both are odious, although the alleged sickness may be fake news entirely.
Dr. Drew Pinsky recently opined what many must have suspected — that the virus scare is just the media being hysterical about a public health situation that is not anywhere near verging on a pandemic. In fact, coronavirus is far less serious than the flu in terms of actual fatalities.
But “coronavirus” has lots of syllables and can be blamed on Trump (wrongly) rather than China, so the press can’t leave it alone.
Below, Red China Coronavirus
Dr. Drew appeared with Laura Ingraham on Monday, and he is not happy with the press:
LAURA INGRAHAM: Now, it’s not just the Democrats who are recklessly politicizing the coronavirus threat. Their media lapdogs are at it as well:
FAREED ZAKARIA: The coronavirus outbreak has the potential to become a global pandemic.
JAKE TAPPER: It’s a global health process, the spread of the coronavirus in the United States.
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: This is a serious threat, and Donald Trump needs to do his job.
MSNBC FEMALE: It could get worse, and it could be precipitated by actions taken by the administration.
INGRAHAM: My next guest says some of those in the media need to sit back and let the professionals do their work. Joining me now, Dr. Drew Pinsky, an addiction medicine specialist, host of “Dr. Drew After Dark” podcast. Dr. Drew, how much damage is the media causing now the way they’re covering this?
DR. DREW PINSKY: Essentially the entire problem we are having is due to panic, not the virus. I was saying this six weeks ago.
We have six deaths from the coronavirus, 18,000 deaths from the flu. Why isn’t the message, get your flu vaccine? This is amongst us. It is milder than we thought. The fatality rate is going to drop as we identify more cases.
The entirety of the problem now is that people are being pushed into bankruptcy. Travel is down. The supply chain is being interrupted because of panic, not because of the virus. The flu virus in this country is vastly more consequential, and nobody is talking about that.
INGRAHAM: And Dr. Drew, I was traveling over the weekend, four different flights. And people are wearing masks on the plane. Now, it makes traveling kind of interesting, you can’t really see their facial expressions. But that does zero to prevent you from getting the flu. Zero, correct?
PINSKY: It’s panic. It’s panic. That is panic. That is people engaged in panicked behavior. And that is what concerns me. It is a press-induced panic that will have real consequences. It will not be the virus.
Listen, The Journal of the American Medical Association published lead articles this week about what they were reporting on the coronavirus. But one of the things they asked was why did the Chinese government clamp down so hard? Was there something special about this virus?
The report was, the reason was the holiday, the Chinese New Year was coming, and during the New Year, apparently everybody travels, and they wanted to get it under control before the holiday, so they clamped down quickly. They got it under control. The holiday came, people traveled. It did not spread. They did exactly what they needed to do.
And then we need to calm down. It is here, it’s mild, and the press needs to shut up. It’s really getting to be a problem.
