Toon: Coronaspiracy

Conservative media are at it again, and their captivated audience is eating it up.

Everything is fine.
Rush Limbaugh, who was recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, told his audience of millions that the [COVID-19] virus is really just the “common cold.” He claimed that it was being overhyped by the director of the National Center of Immunization—who just happens to be the sister of former acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a bad guy in the world of conservative infotainment, thanks to his role in the Mueller investigation—to damage the president.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham dismissed the fear about a potential pandemic as “a new pathway for hitting President Trump,” and speculated that it had been engineered by China as payback for the president’s trade war.
Fox News’s Sean Hannity said on Thursday that there was little to be afraid of—no Americans had died, he noted, days before they inevitably did—and that the virus was simply the latest desperate anti-Trump ploy from Democrats. Having struck out on impeachment, they were now “sadly politicizing and weaponizing an infectious disease as their next effort to bludgeon President Trump.”
It is the same defense that Trump’s supporters have trotted out for the past four years: Obfuscate the truth, laud the president, blame the Democrats.

This denialism is mother's milk to Donald Berzelius Trump, who tweeted, “Low Ratings Fake News MSDNC (Comcast) & @CNN are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus [sic] look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible."

It is true that the markets have been severely shaken by having one of the world's most important suppliers and consumers virtually shut down, and by discovering a turd in the vacation travel industry punch bowl.

Oh, and there is the matter of thousands of deaths and the prospect of there not being a cure for over a year, too. But the stock market doesn't usually have a problem with matters of mortality and morbidity.

But contagion is highly unpredictable — who foresaw Italy and Iran becoming such hot spots? — and if there's anything stock markets hate, it's unpredictability.

That unpredictability is what makes the denialism of Limbaugh, Ingraham, Hannity and their ilk so dangerous. We've seen the danger in the form of the anti-vaxxers who put not only their own children at risk but also any children who have the misfortune to be around them. COVID-19 appears not to pose a lethal threat to the young and hardy at this point, but we know that it has a latency period of several days and is communicable before symptoms are evident.

None of those nursing home residents in Kirkland, Washington had been to China, Iran, or Italy lately, you know.

Well, I'm not a doctor, and I don't even play one on TV, so I'll leave you with this link to the Center for Disease Control if you want to keep up with more authoritative information than your humble ink-slinger can provide.