After three days of treatment for the China virus at the Walter Reed Medical Center, President Trump was back at the White House this week with a new message for Americans.
In a video posted Monday shortly after his return, the president implored Americans not to let the virus “dominate” their lives. “Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it,” he said. “Don’t let it take over your lives. Don’t let that happen.”
Unsurprisingly, rather than see the president’s message as one of hope and strength in the face of the pandemic, the mainstream media chose to condemn Trump’s comments as an insult to those still suffering or who have lost family members to the virus.
Pointing to nearly 7.5 million Covid-19 cases and more than 210,000 deaths nationwide, the talking heads at CNN, MSNBC, and even at Fox News condemned Trump for his statement.
Their reaction made me wonder how today’s media might have reacted to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words after his 1932 election during the worst economic depression in American history when unemployment was at 25 percent and the future was at its bleakest.
In ten short words, FDR gave a nation in free fall hope:
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Somehow I think if today’s television pundits were transported back to 1932 they would attack FDR for trying to put a positive spin on things in the face of unprecedented national homelessness, poverty, and despair.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a leader like Joe Biden who traffics in doom and gloom. I want a president who is positive when negativity is the prevailing sentiment.
South African author and blogger Mandi Hart is correct when she says: “Fear lies to us. It keeps us locked behind closed doors. Whether the doors are wooden ones or our hearts, fear locks us in and holds us captive.”
Unfortunately, China virus hysteria fanned and fueled by a dishonest media is apparently here to stay and it is getting worse seven months after we first confronted the novel disease.
Take a look at these recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control. They confirm that nearly everyone under the age of 70 who contracts the disease recovers and that 95 percent of adults over 70 also recover.
What’s more, most sufferers report mild symptoms and overly-sensitive tests give false positives for people showing no symptoms at all. Hospitals are not overflowing with COVID patients and, with few exceptions, never were.
Yet the terrified media slogs on in its mission to destroy the Trump presidency by terrifying Americans with doom and gloom stories about the virus.
To his credit, President Trump is not having any of it.
“The president isn’t going to hide from the public or the press,” Dr. Scott Atlas, a critic of lockdowns, said recently. “He wants to go to work. He wants to see Americans and he wants to interact with others. He won’t hide in the basement or frozen in fear behind a mask.”
What is wrong with that? Do we all have to curl up into a ball and lie shaking with fear on the floor? What is wrong with confronting the China virus for what it is—a contagious respiratory illness similar to the flu. The difference is that Covid-19 is a new virus called SARS-COV-2 while the flu is caused by infection with an influenza virus.
Of course, there are some key differences between flu and COVID-19. COVID-19 seems to spread more easily than flu and causes more serious illnesses in some people. It can also take longer before people show symptoms and people can be contagious longer.
Another important difference is there is a vaccine to protect against flu. There is currently no vaccine to prevent COVID-19, but it’s on the way.
Unfortunately, because the virus has been so politicized by the media and those eager to throw Trump out of the White House, the paranoia enveloping the disease is baked in so deeply that it’s unlikely the country will emerge from this constant state of fear anytime soon.
The question is this: How can a nation once so resilient and optimistic regain its sanity and return to life as usual? Will we ever be able to accept that this virus is not unlike other serious viruses that we’ve handled in the past without obliterating the economy, submitting to house arrest, or squawking manically about face-coverings?
Dr. Atlas said recently that contrary to Joe Biden’s frequent accusation that President Trump won’t “listen” to the scientists, that “narrative could not be more wrong. There is a difference of opinion in the scientific community. There is no monopoly on knowledge.”
In a recent article by author and journalist Julie Kelly, Dr. Atlas named several top scientists, including noted epidemiologists, who refute the efficacy and humanity of lockdowns, especially school closings.
Dr. John Ioannidis, who like Atlas is associated with Stanford University, wrote a prophetic article in March 2020 forewarning the “fiasco” of extended lockdowns. Dr. Ioannidis’ explanatory video that same month was removed from YouTube for violating the site’s terms of service, which meant the professor of medicine and epidemiology at one of the world’s premier universities dared to hold an opinion outside mainstream thinking at the time.
As Kelly wrote: “Other experts such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta are partnering with Atlas to use science and logic in hopes of deprogramming a largely brainwashed public. The trio this week issued a statement, called the Great Barrington Declaration, aimed at promoting ‘focused protection’ that would safeguard high-risk populations while encouraging life to return to normal as quickly as possible.”
“As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies,” the declaration states. “Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”
Thousands of experts and members of the public have signed the petition so far.
Kelly and a handful of other determined journalists who don’t drink the mainstream media’s noxious Kool-Aid are doing this nation a tremendous service by providing substantiated research and information that doesn’t comport with the established leftist orthodoxy. The problem, of course, is in the dissemination of that information to a broader audience when outlets are few, and social media czars are censoring anything they believe is antithetical to the putative medical canon.
As Nobel prize-winning physicist and chemist, Marie Curie once said: “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
Amen to that.
