On Covid-19 The Economist blows it again

George Rebane

When the latest issue of the “world’s oldest newspaper” (aka the left-leaning The Economist) arrived this week with its cover story ‘Why governments get it wrong’, and promised to reveal how government can get it right, I got all excited.  Finally, someone is willing to step forward and tell us what the proper response should have been to the Covid pandemic.  All of us in the US have heard about eight months of Democrats telling everyone who would listen that President Trump has done it all wrong and thereby cost the nation tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.  Moreover, candidate Biden has had the correct response tucked under his armpit the whole time, and now is the time to get Bumblebrain into office so that under his (her?) leadership we can finally be rid of this dreaded disease.

Of course, it’s already turned out that Biden’s Monday quarterbacking has nothing in it that Trump doesn’t already have in play, and he didn’t even think of putting vaccine development into an historically novel overdrive with Project Warp Speed.  But all that makes no never mind to the legions of loyal leftwing lackeys (you know, all those people with college degrees) – perhaps the country’s most unaccomplished presidential candidate is still their man with all the answers, just as soon as they swear in the Harris/Biden administration.  The bottom line of all this campaign hyperventilating is that it delivered no specifics as to what Trump should have done when, a response policy that would have saved all those thousands of lives, and not put the economy into lockdown life support.

Enter the 26sep20 issue of The Economist. With its lead piece claiming that governments have been playing whackamole when the correct response strategy lay at hand.  And then you continue to read their rhetoric which turns out to be nothing but a rehash of the year’s global Covid history of various responses, in all of which governments are “failing” to practice “the basics of public health”.  And what exactly are these failures?  Well nothing that is not already being done in various forms by all governments guided by their own situations and executing their available best practices.  Ignoring this, the newspaper’s editorial worthies blithely go on to advise that “governments must identify the trade-offs that make most economic and social sense.”  Specifically they laud British Columbia “that set principles and invite individuals, schools and workplaces to devise their own plans of realizing them, will be able to sustain the effort in the months ahead.”  Whaaat?!! Does that critique and advice sound like going in circles?  

What also brought a smile to my lips was the quiet insertion of “The increase in Europe’s diagnosed cases reflects reality, but the global effect is an artefact of extra testing, which picks up cases that would have been missed.”  Do you recall what the Democrats and their lamestream media did when President Trump pointed out that increased testing contributed to the jump in Covid cases?  This eminently reasonable conclusion was shouted down, and Trump was accused of practicing medicine without a license, of claiming that testing caused Covid and its cure was to minimize testing.  In short, the president was made out to be an imbecile by all leftwingers (including those who read RR), when anyone with a 3-digit IQ could understand the effect on Covid case count from the widespread testing of more people.  Did anyone hear of a retraction by our Democrat brethren and cistern?  Or perhaps we missed their red-faced admission that they were the actual imbeciles?

And finally, The Economist admits that, among all the governments’ errors, in America it was the CDC, “once the world’s most respected public-health body”, that was “plagued by errors (and) poor leadership”.  As a responsible leader, President Trump correctly pointed this out to Americans as the CDC continued to miss its projections, and waffled this way and that on its recommendations.  But in the view of the revered, almost two-century-old newspaper, it all was President Trump’s fault for “denigrating” the agency.

So the conclusion I draw from such reportage is that TDS has also become a global political pandemic, little remains of what once was known as journalism, and that in the 21^st century the public may have little or no chance of finding reliable information about anything that issues from the current cacophony of broadcast and online news outlets.

Comments

[Scott O]

See Marc Cuniberti's editorial in the Union. The 'lives before money' BS is going to end up killing more people than anyone wants to admit.
Financial meltdowns world-wide can often lead to wars. The idea that we can just sit at home and have the govt print money and hand it out will be disastrous. Cave dwellers understood risk vs prosperity better than we do.

[Bill Tozer]

‘Canceled! One of world's top neuroradiologists’, by Victor Davis Hanson

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1020/hanson100120.php3