{"id":1387632,"date":"2022-03-18T05:10:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-18T09:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1387632"},"modified":"2022-03-18T08:00:55","modified_gmt":"2022-03-18T12:00:55","slug":"ignorance-goes-viral-in-a-new-book-on-covid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/ignorance-goes-viral-in-a-new-book-on-covid\/","title":{"rendered":"Ignorance Goes Viral In A New Book On Covid"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fignorance-goes-viral-in-a-new-book-on-covid%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1387632&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/virus.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p><em>Virus<\/em>\u00a0is a strange little book from liberal journalist Nina Burleigh, seemingly written solely to blame Trumpism, religious zealots, and capitalism for the deadly toll of the coronavirus in America. The full title, <em>Virus: Vaccinations, The CDC, And The Hijacking Of America\u2019s Response To The Pandemic<\/em>, actually underplays the sneering tone that warps this short, nasty book.<\/p>\n<p>On the first page we learn \u201cthis story involves mass death, religious zealots, and the worst case of government malpractice in the history of the United States.\u201d Such rhetoric, to put it mildly, calls into question Burleigh\u2019s claim that she \u201ctried to take a broad and balanced view of the pandemic response in government, in politics, and in culture.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The sneering accusations hurled at the Trump administration will no doubt energize lefty readers and please Burleigh\u2019s publishers at left-wing Seven Stories Press. But surely there is enough to fault in the previous administration\u2019s pandemic response without smearing it as a band of killers led by \u201ca malignant clown\u201d?<\/p>\n<p>Religiously motivated killers, no less. Burleigh encourages her readers to look beyond the \u201cdeplorables\u201d and see that \u201cTrump\u2019s true backers were crony capitalists and stone-cold Koch-bro antigovernment ideologues. They were flanked by Rapture-ready religious zealots.\u201d For limited government advocates, \u201cthe pandemic was a gift from God.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Burleigh\u2019s fixation on religious zealotry, especially regarding abortion, that only she can detect provides the book much of its vitriolic zip. Dr. Anthony Fauci is beloved, while Dr. Deborah Birx is dismissed as being \u201caligned with homophobic organizations.\u201d (How odd, then, that Birx had previously worked in the Obama administration.)<\/p>\n<p>Defenses of Planned Parenthood show up bizarrely often in a book ostensibly about the coronavirus. She attacked Vice President Mike Pence\u2019s \u201cantipathy to science\u201d for his attempt to defund the abortion mill while serving as a congressman from Indiana.<\/p>\n<p>Burleigh really loves abortion. During the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in 1998, Burleigh, then a\u00a0<em>Time<\/em>\u00a0magazine contributor, notoriously told\u00a0<em>The Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0she\u2019d perform sexual favors for Bill Clinton for keeping abortion legal. \u201cI think American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs,\u201d she wrote. <\/p>\n<p>Politically motivated inconsistencies abound. She writes petulantly of Trump\u2019s drive to get vaccines swiftly online via Operation Warp Speed, the public-private\u00a0partnership to accelerate vaccine development and delivery, while\u00a0spreading thinly evidenced suggestions of muckraking. Then she turns around and blames the administration for not making vaccines a priority!<\/p>\n<p>She let Richard Horton, editor of the\u00a0<em>Lancet<\/em>\u00a0medical journal, describe Trump\u2019s withdrawal of the United States from the World Health Organization as a \u201ccrime against humanity.\u201d Yet later she admits \u201cThe CDC [Centers for Disease Control] and the WHO [World Health Organization] and other experts initially told the public not to worry about masking up.\u201d Naturally, she skips recounting how the WHO credulously deferred to China, who spread misinformation about the virus\u2019 impacts and origins during the critical early weeks of the pandemic.<\/p>\n<p>She approvingly cites an Oxfam report \u201cblaming the American economic system for how the pandemic starved and killed the poor and brown while enriching the rich and white in America,\u201d kindling further suspicions this book is more an anti-Trump temper tantrum than an objective dissection of the Trump administration\u2019s virus response. Free-market greed is to blame for everything: \u201cNothing about this obscene picture is accidental. It is a consequence of decades of a philosophy that came to prevail after Ronald Reagan\u2019s election.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a shame, because when she reins in the vitriol, Burleigh can be informative. There are clear explanations of how viruses evolve and how mRNA vaccines like Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna work. We learn the virologist Jonas Salk, a public icon for developing a polio vaccine, was \u201cloathed by colleagues for his ego and unwillingness to share credit.\u201d She even makes conservative arguments, perhaps unknowingly, about how corrupted polio vaccines resulted in \u201cproduct liability lawsuits\u201d which \u201cchilled pharmaceutical innovation for years to come,\u201d particularly for low-profit preparations like vaccines.<\/p>\n<p>But the closer to current events she gets, the more her journalistic instincts devolve into ideological ranting and contradiction. You wonder if the author was even paying attention in 2020 when she rants \u201cAmericans wouldn\u2019t wear masks and wouldn\u2019t stay home.\u201d Did Burleigh truly not catch the dystopian-film-style shots of major American cities from spring 2020 and beyond? Whatever mistakes were made, they were not rooted in a lack of sacrifice by average Americans.<\/p>\n<p>After blaming selfishness and capitalism for Americans not staying home to stop the spread, she then blames capitalism for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos having doubled his wealth during the pandemic. But wasn\u2019t Amazon delivery helping Americans stay home and stop the spread? She despairs that people had become \u201cstrangers to each other.\u201d Perhaps staying home and masking up had something to do with that?<\/p>\n<p>And while the author snottily observes a \u201cgrowing antipathy among a sector of Americans toward science and experts,\u201d the actual Covid facts that have proliferated after\u00a0<em>Virus<\/em>\u2019s release have further depreciated its value as journalism.<\/p>\n<p>Burleigh loves masks almost as much as she loves abortion, complaining of \u201cred-blooded, liberty-loving Americans ripping their masks off and fighting with store managers in Target and Walmart.\u201d Yet <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/iae\/files\/2022\/01\/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf\">a meta-study<\/a>\u00a0suggested authoritarian measures like mask mandates didn\u2019t budge the Covid death rate. With blue states tearing down mask mandates before facing the voters in November, and entertainment elites parading bare-faced in front of masked servers, religious faith in masking has surely been discredited.<\/p>\n<p>Burleigh\u2019s faith in the supposedly science-based CDC must be sorely tested as well, now that we are learning President Biden\u2019s politicized CDC was doing the bidding of teachers unions to keep schools shut and pushing pathetically weak studies in support of mask mandates in schools. Left-wing fans of Burleigh\u2019s anti-Trump, anti-capitalist bludgeons may be immune to reason, but judging by the political winds, reality is beginning to permeate the national mask.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Virus\u00a0is a strange little book from liberal journalist Nina Burleigh, seemingly written solely to blame Trumpism, religious zealots, and capitalism for the deadly toll of the coronavirus in America. The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1894135,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1387632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1387632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1387632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1387632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1894135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1387632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1387632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1387632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}