Media That Argued Getting Haircuts and Going to School Would Kill People Sugarcoats Biden’s COVID Diagnosis

Remember when bureaucrats and talking heads warned you ominously that Covid was so arbitrarily deadly that you couldn’t go to church, your kids couldn’t go to school, and you couldn’t have Christmas dinner with your family? If you didn’t triple-mask, you were killing grandmas. And if you came down with the virus? Boy, were you a selfish, evil person clearly set on trying to kill us all.

“But since Covid is typically dangerous only for elderly people and people with compromised immune systems or other high risk factors, shouldn’t we just put measures in place to protect those people and let everyone choose to live our lives?” we protested. Not a chance, we were told. They insisted even kindergarteners needed to get a Covid shot to save lives — a shot that doesn’t protect against infection or transmission, even though the vaccine snobs still praise it every time they get sick. “Thank goodness for this vaccine and the 19 booster shots that didn’t prevent me from getting the virus. If I had only gotten 18 boosters I would have been a goner, folks.”

And yet, now that President Joe Biden has contracted Covid, all those people who warned you the virus should leave you in constant fear for your life are awkwardly trying to avoid eye contact. We all wish the president well in his recovery. At 78, Biden is at a far higher risk for severe Covid complications than the average American, and far more vulnerable than the millions of schoolchildren that were banned from their classrooms by the Covid gatekeepers. But are those gatekeepers as worried now as they told you to be?

“Biden’s age puts him at risk for severe Covid, but experts predict boosters and Paxlovid will aid in a quick recovery,” NBC News assures us. “President Biden, double-boosted, is in a good position to fight covid,” adds The Washington Post.

My personal favorite, also from WaPo: “Biden’s covid diagnosis shows the benefits of avoiding infection.” (In other words, Biden getting sick shows the benefits of avoiding sickness — real J-school brilliance there.) Writer Philip Bump brushes off Biden’s positive test as “inevitable” for “a guy who meets a lot of people and does a lot of traveling, after all” — a far cry from the blame game major media outlets played when former President Donald Trump contracted the virus — before pitifully trying to justify why Trump was reckless for contracting Covid while Biden was not for doing the same thing.

They’re clearly not worried about Biden falling deadly ill, or at least they’re going to great pains to convince you they’re not. But if Biden’s Covid diagnosis is no big deal, why was a similar diagnosis portrayed so ominously as a deathly threat to millions of Americans who are at far less risk than Biden is? It’s Biden’s demographic that Covid mandate opponents have emphasized protecting from the beginning.

There are only two possible conclusions. The first is that the Covid cabal of media and bureaucrats genuinely think 5-year-old kindergarten students or able-bodied men whose small businesses were shuttered or loyal churchgoers are somehow at far more severe risk of Covid complications than the frail, barely coherent, septuagenarian president who just told the world that he has cancer. The second conclusion is that they think you’re stupid enough to believe the first.

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

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