I wrote about this on Freedom and Reason back in April in the blog “Whatever that number is”: Vaccine Hesitancy, Common Sense, and Stigmatizing Christians. Bill Maher recently brought it to the attention of Jimmy Kimmel on the latter’s show. Kimmel didn’t know what to do with it. What was it? The remarkable ignorance of Democrats and progressives about the COVID-19 situation.
So that we move on the ground of fact, for the record, the hospitalization rate from or with COVID-19 is between 1-5 percent depending on state and region. This includes incidental positive tests. For example, if you go to the hospital for a colonoscopy and test positive for COVID-19, now you are an official COVID-19 hospitalization case. This means that the actual risk of being hospitalized from COVID-19 is smaller than the official statistics suggest. As part of its strategy of fear porn, the corporate state propaganda system manufactures the illusion of significant hospitalizations rates from COVID-19. As readers of my blog know, for the vast majority of people, SARS-CoV-2 is asymptomatic or presents with very mild symptoms. Of course, you cannot sustain a moral panic with the facts. So the corporate media misleads its audience.
With that in mind, recall that, earlier this year, a study by the Brookings Institute, asking a representative samples of Democrats and Republicans to estimate COVID-19 hospitalizations, found that Democrats are remarkably ignorant about the facts. More than quarter (25.6 percent) of Republicans articulated the accurate statistic (which indicates that the propaganda affected them to some extent, as well), whereas fewer than one-in-ten (only 9.8 percent) of Democrats did. Astonishingly, 41 percent of Democrats believed that half or more of those infected with SARS-CoV-2 would be hospitalized. For Democrats, more than a third believe that one out of every two infections results in hospitalization. Taken together, well more than two-thirds of Democrats believed hospitalizations per infection were 20 percent or more. These are wildly inaccurate estimates. Frankly, it’s comical it’s so bad.
Progressives are always bashing conservatives for being backward ignorant rubes. Based on his loathing of those he assumes are unvaccinated, Kimmel said the other day that he wants to deny the vaccine hesitant medical treatment (Biden’s Biofascist Regime). (I bet he wouldn’t say that about fat people, whose risk of serious complications from COVID-19 is much greater than the general population. Or black people, who are much less likely to seek the shot.) But the Brookings Institute study finds that it’s conservatives who have a superior grasp of the risks of COVID-19. And not by a little bit. So who are the backward ignorant rubes in all this? Answer: the people who can’t wait to vaccinate their children against a virus the risk of which for children in effectively infinitesimal. Influenza poses a much greater risk to children than SARS-CoV-2. Progressive parents obviously pose a risk, as well.
The ignorance is explicable and the explanation is instructive: get your ass away from these dumb asses. Rank-and-file progressives are among the most gullible people on the face of the planet. They have a tortured relationship to reason and science, which is to say they eschew one and clumsily parrot the rhetoric of the other—all the while professing to know more that everybody else. Progressives are prepared to believe so-called authorities in their tribe. And they are too stuck up to doubt themselves. Subjected to fear porn, they will panic. It’s why they wouldn’t leave their homes to go vote in 2020 and Democrat and RINO officials had to manipulate the election system to get Biden across the wire.
As I wrote in that April blog, “Given the nonstop fear campaign by mainstream media, with a viewership drastically skewed towards Democrats, the fact that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to be outside the propaganda bubble contributes to a more accurate grasp of the relative risks of this virus.” (For More on the Remarkable Ignorance of Progressive Democrats click the embedded link.)
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