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Fox Won’t Stop Anti-Vaccine Scare Campaign Even as Delta Variant Spreads

"Weird science: How a 'shoddy' Bannon-backed paper on coronavirus origins made its way to an audience of millions
[...]
(CNN) -- It was a blockbuster story. A respected Chinese virologist appeared on Tucker Carlson's show .. https://www.foxnews.com/media/chinese-virologist-government-intentionally-coronavirus .. on Fox News in mid-September to share the results of her just-completed report. The conclusion: The novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 was likely engineered in a Chinese lab. On Carlson's show, she claimed it was intentionally released into the world.
P - Then, its validity began to unravel. The publication of the paper .. https://zenodo.org/record/4028830#.X4zTmi2z3kK .. by lead author Li-Meng Yan..."

Conservative commentators, including those who have been vaccinated themselves, appear willing to endanger their audience for ratings.

By Charlotte Klein

July 11, 2021


Brian Kilmeade at Fox News Channel Studios on September 10, 2019. by Noam Galai/Getty Images

All links

As the threat of the Delta variant grows, public health experts are urging Americans to get vaccinated for the coronavirus and “try and save their own lives,” as Dr. Anthony Fauci put it Sunday. Right-wing media, however, appears to only be increasing its anti-vaccine messaging, with conservative commentators politicizing .. https://twitter.com/LisPower1/status/1413116850108502016?s=20 .. the vaccine and potentially endangering their audience.

“They’re going to be knocking on your doors, I guess with a cotton ball and a needle, and they’re going to look to put a needle into your deltoid—stop asking questions,” Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade said last week, inaccurately conflating President Joe Biden’s door-to-door initiative to get people vaccinated with a sinister infringement .. https://twitter.com/RealCandaceO/status/1412882282491305999?s=20 .. on personal freedom. CNN’s Brian Stelter pointed out Friday that local governments have already been doing such outreach.

Brian Stelter
@brianstelter
·
Jul 11
For some of these right-wing media stars, resisting the
Covid vaccines is a badge of honor, a way to "stick it to
the blue states." They claim to respect their audience, but
are actually putting them at risk.
VIDEO
Link to tweet

Nonetheless, Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen called Biden’s plan “Orwellian” and in a recent monologue, Fox News host Laura Ingraham connected Biden’s “creepy” initiative to the conspiracy theory of “great global resetters, who love seeing us shut in and shut up.” She commended Americans who “are wising up to this charade” by refusing to get vaccinated, per Media Matters.

Along with the Big Brother warnings, Fox’s anti-vaccine scare campaign has involved undermining .. https://www.mediaite.com/tv/tucker-carlson-casually-suggests-to-viewers-maybe-covid-19-vaccine-doesnt-work-and-theyre-simply-not-telling-you-that/ .. the vaccine’s safety and seemingly exploiting rare negative side effects for ratings. And such fear-mongering could have a real impact on those who might feel hesitant about whether to get the shot. Surgo Ventures, a health nonprofit, noted in May .. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f7671d12c27e40b67ce4400/t/60ad64608effeb7ebf03bd17/1621976164733/FINAL+for+posting_Facebook+Survey+Summary+Document+for+Website.docx+(1).pdf .. that “Republicans remain overrepresented in the COVID Skeptic persona,” though “that number has fallen over time.” They also pointed out that “localized efforts should focus on combating misinformation around COVID-19 that spans party lines.” Rather than helping hesitant viewers obtain information about the documented benefits of the vaccine—and how to access it—Fox seems to be doing the opposite, some have observed.

“These radio stars, these TV stars: they are trusted individuals in Republican communities,” Stelter noted. “But they are abusing that trust by pushing anti-vaccination propaganda, and it’s something that ultimately affects every American.”

Matthew Gertz @MattGertz· Jul 9, 2021
Replying to @MattGertz
And now huge swaths of Republicans say they are not and will not be
vaccinated. It's a culture war issue rather than a health one because
that's the lens through which Fox presents the world to its viewers.
Matthew Gertz
@MattGertz
We're headed for a scenario in which Democrats are
vaccinated and Republicans aren't, and a lot of Fox
viewers end up dead because they listened to the network
instead of getting shots.
10:05 PM · Jul 9, 2021
Twitter

Right-wing media's dangerous anti-vaccine messaging comes as the highly contagious Delta variant, which vaccines are shown to be effective against, spreads rapidly in parts of the country with lower vaccination rates. Delta became the dominant variant in the United States this week, according .. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/09/world/covid-19-vaccine-coronavirus-updates#delta-accounts-for-nearly-all-virus-cases-in-southwestern-missouri-where-a-hospital-recently-ran-out-of-ventilators .. to the New York Times. It’s reportedly driving almost three-fourths of the new cases in Missouri, one of several vulnerable states seeing increased cases and hospitalizations. Less than half of all Missouri adults are fully vaccinated, and hospitals there are overwhelmed amid a surge of new cases .. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/09/world/covid-19-vaccine-coronavirus-updates#delta-accounts-for-nearly-all-virus-cases-in-southwestern-missouri-where-a-hospital-recently-ran-out-of-ventilators . In Mississippi, where only a third of the population is fully vaccinated, hospitalizations are up .. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/09/world/covid-19-vaccine-coronavirus-updates .. 35 percent from two weeks ago. “We’ve seen almost an entire takeover in the Delta variant,” Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs told CNN.

Media Matters president Angelo Carusone argued .. https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/msnbc-angelo-carusone-says-fox-hosts-are-getting-vaccinated-while-lying-their .. that Fox hosts are “lying to their audience” given the public health measures the network itself is following. All of the Fox & Friends hosts said they have been vaccinated .. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/05/tucker-carlson-covid-vaccine-skeptic , as have multiple other Fox News personalities. “It is one thing if they’re not promoting the vaccine, but they’re really going out of their way to get people to become hostile to the idea of it,” Carusone said.

Carusone has traced .. https://www.mediamatters.org/chris-hayes/msnbcs-all-angelo-carusone-highlights-tucker-carlsons-dangerous-anti-vaccine-lies .. the network’s acceleration toward anti-vaccination views to May, when Tucker Carlson, long one of the network’s loudest vaccine skeptics, amplified the conspiracy theory that tens of thousands of people were dying from the vaccine.

“It's not just an anti-vax thing which is somewhat passive in some ways,” Carusone told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Friday. “They're building something that is actively anti-public health.”

More Great Stories From Vanity Fair [links inside]

— Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Decades-Long Relationship With Leslie Wexner
— Trump’s Deranged Replacement Theory Might’ve Lost Him the Election
— Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk Want to Burn Their Cash in Space
— Three Texans Bust Myths About the Alamo’s Famous “Last Stand”
— The Guy Who Could Send Trump to Prison May Soon Cooperate With the Feds
— Bill and Melinda Gates’s Epic Divorce Saga Enters Its Next Phase
— Juneteenth, Critical Race Theory, and the Winding Road Toward Reckoning
— Trump Is Now Urging People Not to Vaccinate Their Kids Against COVID
— From the Archive: Microsoft’s Odd Couple, in the Words of Paul Allen

Charlotte Klein is a staff writer at Vanity Fair’s Hive.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/07/foxs-anti-vaccine-messaging-ramps-up-alongside-deltas-spread

See also:

The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man
In a crowded field of wrongness, one person stands out: Alex Berenson.
[...]
Berenson has a big megaphone. He has more than 200,000 followers on Twitter and millions of viewers for his frequent appearances on Fox News’ most-watched shows. On Laura Ingraham’s show, he downplayed the vaccines, suggesting that Israel’s experience proved they were considerably less effective than initially claimed. On Tucker Carlson Tonight, he predicted that the vaccines would cause an uptick in cases of COVID-related illness and death in the U.S.
P - The vaccines have inspired his most troubling comments. For the past few weeks on Twitter, Berenson has mischaracterized just about every detail regarding the vaccines to make the dubious case that most people would be better off avoiding them.
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GOP AND FOX NEWS RUSH TO TURN VACCINE DOOR-KNOCKERS INTO TERRIFYING STRAW MEN
[...]
Republican members of Congress and conservative talkers have wrongly pitched the effort as forced vaccination — even repeatedly invoking the Nazis — and lodged baseless suggestions that it would be done using illegally obtained medical information. Others have suggested it’s something akin to government coercion or even a precursor to gun confiscation.

We know relatively little about the nascent effort thus far, but what we do know bears little to no resemblance to these allegations.
P - Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) got the ball rolling Tuesday by comparing the effort to “medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations.” Not to be outdone, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) took to Twitter the next day to offer her own Nazi comparison, labeling the door-knockers “needle Nazis.”
P - If anyone should know the folly of such metaphors, it would seem to be Greene, who just three weeks prior conceded in an apology after another wayward Nazi/coronavirus comment that “there is no comparison to the Holocaust.” And it’s worth emphasizing that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe door-knockers would compel vaccinations, which would be illegal, in the way Nazis and the Sturmabteilung, also known as the brownshirts, used violence to enforce their political will.
P - But while these might be the most extreme examples, they’re hardly alone.
P - Fox News host Tucker Cnarlson also wrongly pitched this effort as being about forcing vaccinations. “The idea that you would force people to take medicine they don’t want or need — is there a precedent for that in our lifetimes?” he said Tuesday. Again, that’s not at all what is proposed here. But it didn’t stop Carlson on his show, where nuance often goes to die, from saying, “I honestly think it’s the greatest scandal in my lifetime, by far. I thought the Iraq War was; it seems much bigger than that.”
P - (Fox News political analyst Brit Hume, to his credit, responded to Carlson’s comments by gently noting his summary was incorrect and that maybe there should be a little more benefit of the doubt.)
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