One of the common mantras of the COVID-19 pandemic was “we’re in this together,” and yet, sadly, we weren’t. From the beginning, it was clear that the Democrats and the media saw it as an opportunity to attack President Trump. The mainstream media hated him with a passion. Shocked by his victory in the 2016 election, they never stopped trying to undermine him and his presidency.
But by February 2020, Trump looked like he was going to cruise to reelection. Then the pandemic hit, and the media’s previous efforts to accuse him of colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election were nothing compared to what they did during the pandemic. Trump’s efforts to help the nation and the world through the pandemic were panned by a media that was desperate to see him take a fall.
In early March, the World Health Organization claimed that 3.4% of coronavirus patients had died from the disease. “Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19… cases have died,” claimed WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus during a briefing. “By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected.”
When Trump pointed out this number was false, the media accused him of downplaying the pandemic. He was right, of course. Two months later, the CDC’s estimated the overall mortality rate for COVID-19 was down to 0.26%.
Not that Trump got any credit for being right.
Nor did Trump get any credit for touting a possible game-changing therapeutic in March 2020, when he spoke of a study that showed hydroxychloroquine showed promise in treating COVID in small studies. It could have been a game-changer indeed, as the majority of studies have shown that it reduced mortality by at least 50%.
But, for whatever reason, the media decided Trump was evil for suggesting that the decades-old anti-malaria drug that was out of patent and could be manufactured cheaply could possibly help in the fight against COVID. They accused him of “practicing medicine without a license” and “selling snake oil.” How many lives could have been saved if the media took Trump seriously? I dare not speculate, but the war on hydroxychloroquine was relentless.
The media never stopped looking for ways to blame Trump for the pandemic — even if it meant not blaming China. We now know that there was evidence that COVID had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of VIrology as early as September 2019, but China didn’t reveal its existence until December 31.
The Biden administration now admits that the lab leak theory is the most plausible explanation, but in 2020, when Trump said he’d seen evidence that COVID leaked from the lab and insisted that China (and the World Health Organization) ought to pay a price for what happened, the media sided with China and the WHO.
A key figure in the efforts to undermine the lab leak theory turned out to be Dr. Anthony Fauci, who publicly refuted the theory for over a year and prompted a study specifically to contradict it even though he’d been told in the early days of the pandemic that COVID-19 had “unusual features” that “potentially look engineered.” Even CNN’s former CEO Jeff Zucker ordered his network not to report on the lab leak theory, calling it a “Trump talking point.” Now, who knows if China will ever be held accountable?
We were never “in this together.” The radical left only saw the pandemic as an opportunity to get rid of Trump — how different would the pandemic have turned out if the media and the Democrats actually cared about people and not trying to win an election?