Table of Contents
Tim Graham
Tim Graham is Executive Editor of NewsBusters and host of the NewsBusters Podcast. His career at the MRC began in February 1989 as associate editor of MediaWatch, the monthly newsletter of the MRC before the Internet era.
John Nolte at Breitbart drew attention to how The New York Times can now admit — in paragraph 17 of a newsletter — that the COVID death toll was exaggerated by a third. David Leonhardt — a former Times Washington bureau chief — touted “A Positive COVID Milestone: In a sign that the pandemic really is over, the total number of Americans dying each day is no longer historically abnormal.”
Now that Biden is preparing to run for re-election, it’s time to admit an exaggeration.
The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.
Leonhardt, who was seen as too optimistic on COVID by the most aggressive lockdown lobbyists, added:
“Almost a year ago, President Biden angered some public health experts when he declared, “The pandemic is over.” He may have been premature to make that declaration. But the excess-deaths milestone suggests that it’s true now: The pandemic is finally over.”
Nolte collected the receipts of all the media outlets and officials who rained fire on the idea that the death toll was exaggerated. Let’s guess that’s because they thought COVID was the silver bullet to defeating Trump.
Here’s how the Times responded when Trump suggested the death count was over-hyped:
Last Friday, Mr. Trump told reporters that he accepted the current death toll, but that the figures could be “lower than” the official count, which now totals nearly 95,000.
Most statisticians and public health experts say he is wrong; the death toll is probably far higher than what is publicly known. … Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told lawmakers this month that the overall toll was likely an undercount. “I don’t know exactly what percent higher but almost certainly it is higher[.]”
Here’s Fauci again:
Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious diseases expert, has warned that baseless “conspiracy theories” are swirling around the coronavirus crisis following claims that America’s official death toll from Covid-19 has been overstated.
Far-left PolitiFact gave the claim COVID deaths were overcounted a “pants on fire.”
CNNLOL: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doubled down against rumours — spread mostly on social media — suggesting that coronavirus deaths have been greatly exaggerated.”
As Nolte argued, “We shut down the country, we closed schools, we bankrupted people, we bankrupted small businesses, we destroyed our economy, we transferred enormous wealth to the top one per cent… All based on data that was off by a full third.” We were told to Follow The Science. So where did that lead us? “Science” is a human process, with all the attendant biases, but they presented their biases as Truth in 2020.
