Popular Covid Myths
Magness on Facebook listing the popular mythological positions and beliefs about Covid. This raises the question, when does erroneous news become propaganda?
False beliefs about COVID that nonetheless have widespread adherence in the media, academia, and parts of the epidemiology profession:
- Large numbers of Americans refuse to wear masks (Reality: mask adoption has held steadily around 80% since July https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/cimt2pupbs/econToplines.pdf)
- Large numbers of Americans are skeptical of the vaccine (Reality: 75% of Americans indicate that they plan to take it in surveys - higher than most European countries https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1124-9/figures/1)
- Large percentages of Americans believe in conspiracy theories about COVID's origins or believe the virus is a hoax (Reality: most of these conspiracy theories only resonate among a tiny minority of the US population, which is about the same for most other countries https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/…/Globalism2020%20Guardian%20Co…)
- The reason the spring lockdowns failed is because not enough Americans followed directions and stayed home when they were told (Reality: US mobility patterns in the spring almost exactly matched Germany, the Netherlands, and several other middle-of-the-pack European countries https://www.aier.org/article/fact-checking-fauci/)
- The reason the spring lockdowns failed is because the US reopened too early (Reality: the US reopening was slower than almost every country in Europe except for the UK https://www.aier.org/…/did-the-us-lockdown-too-late-and-op…/)
- Trump opposed the lockdowns and ignored the epidemiology models (Reality: The federal government directly and explicitly adopted a policy based on Neil Ferguson's Imperial College model on 3/16. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01003-6… Trump also specifically touted Ferguson's model and spent most of the year explicitly citing its projections to claim credit for lives it supposedly saved.
https://www.aier.org/…/professor-lockdown-now-claims-to-ha…/)
- Trump sidelined Fauci in favor of the anti-lockdown recommendations of Scott Atlas (Reality: Fauci has repeatedly and publicly credited Trump for following his policy recommendations.
https://www.huffpost.com/…/fauci-trump-listened_n_5f5815ffc…
Atlas did not even join the task force until August, and was constantly outnumbered by the Fauci-Birx-Collins faction after he arrived)
- The fall lockdowns in the UK were secretly delayed due to the influence of Great Barrington Declaration co-author Sunetra Gupta over the Prime Minister (Reality: Gupta met with Downing Street at the urging of the anti-lockdown minority in the government, but was promptly ignored by Johnson and Matt Hancock. Many of the scientists who are now claiming the UK should have locked down in September or October were publicly stating at the time that lockdowns were off the table and a "strawman"
https://www.aier.org/…/so-much-for-the-strawman-of-lockdow…/)
- The fall/winter surge of COVID is because we failed to lock down again (Reality: the largest and most severe fall/winter surge is in California, which also has one of the most restrictive fall lockdowns.
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