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What a weird, contradictory time to be alive. We live in an age of readily-available information — and an avalanche of lies and mistruths from those who fancy themselves the “gatekeepers of truth”.
One need, of course, look no further than the mainstream media’s reporting of all things pandemic to see this in action.
The latest eructation of this lamentable state of affairs is the ridiculous hysteria over “Omicron”.
Nothing I’d read or heard from the moment Omicron emerged suggested that this was anything but the usual course of a pandemic: a novel virus mutating over time into a much less deadly form. To use a much-derided phrase, Omicron really does seem “just like the flu”.
But, as always, I could be wrong. So, I did what the mainstream media never do: I ventured outside my “bubble” and sought differing opinion. A search on the ABC website, brought me to a lengthy article purporting to outline the dangers of Omicron. Oddly, though, all it seemed to talk about was theoretical concerns: lots of “sciencey” babble about “spike protein mutations”, sprinkled with a whole lot of “maybes”.
Then, buried at almost the end of an article that almost no-one will read in full on a website, there was this admission: despite probably hundreds of thousands of new “cases” (meaning: positive results to a test), not one person has died of Omicron since it emerged. One — one — person has died “with” the variant.
That’s it.
So, as I suspected, Omicron is extremely virulent, but orders of magnitude less deadly than earlier strains of Covid (themselves, it must be noted, 98+% survivable).
But that’s not what the mainstream media want you to hear.
The usual suspects wasted no time ramping up the virus threat.
Last Wednesday, as NSW case numbers blew out to 1360, the electronic media and newspaper websites threw caution and experience to the wind to pump up modelling released by NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard showing NSW could have 25,000 cases a day by the end of January.
Never mind all the overblown modelling that had fallen flat over the previous 20 months. Modern media consumers no longer punish news sources that publish material that turns out to be hopelessly wrong. Remember 2020s predictions of 100,000 deaths in Australia by The Australian Financial Review (March 5, 2020) and up to 150,000 deaths by The Sydney Morning Herald (March 16, 2020). The actual number two years in is 2072, fewer than two bad flu seasons.
As I’ve already hinted, the ABC is easily the worst offender.
The World Today on Wednesday devoted its entire 25 minutes and 11 seconds to Omicron, vaccination research, easing of Covid border restrictions and increasing UK restrictions as Omicron hit London. To be fair to Aunty, at least health editor Norman Swan was more cautious on 7.30 the previous night, accepting Omicron is likely to be less severe than previous variants […]
Much of the Omicron coverage has quickly defaulted to the pro-lockdown, pro-restrictions position preferred by the ABC and Guardian Australia. On The Drum on Wednesday afternoon, host Ellen Fanning seemed at a loss to understand why NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet was continuing with the state’s plan to ease mask mandates and QR code check-ins that day.
This is what Australians get, for our billion-plus tax dollars funnelled into the ABC every year.
Amazingly, at least some public health experts are willing to tell the truth. Former federal deputy chief health officer Nick Coatsworth tried to tell the ABC that it was time to stop yammering hysterically about “cases”. What really matters is hospitalisations and deaths — the latter already falling dramatically in many places.
Peter Collignon, one of the nation’s most sensible public health experts, seemed amused given there is no evidence Omicron is as big a health danger to Australians as the previous Delta wave, and Australia now has very high vaccination rates. Professor Collignon, writing in the SMH and The Age that morning, discussed whether NSW was right to be opening up just as case numbers were rising and Omicron had arrived […]
Indeed, evidence from South Africa, where vaccination rates are low compared with Australia, gives reason to hope Omicron may end up being the beginning of the end of the pandemic as the virus becomes endemic, like influenza.
The Australian
Even Bill Gates is signalling that Omicron is the Omega of the pandemic. Gates wrote on Twitter that, “At some point next year Covid-19 will become an endemic disease in most places”.
Forgive me for thinking that that’s what the mainstream media is really panicking about. Once Covid is gone, what will they have left to drive clicks? With Donald Trump gone (for now, at least), the media will have nothing.
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