Coronavirus Disinformation is Harmful to Your Health
The President and conspiracy groups spread harmful lies that undermine facts and science
Like all articles on The New Haberdasher, this story is presented to you for free. If you like what I do, consider supporting my work with a small monetary contribution at my Patreon and thank you.
Looking around, you’d think the world is in chaos. The stock market, while rebounding somewhat yesterday, has just had its worst week since the summer of 2008. Old people are clutching their pearls hoping that the Red Menace can be stopped by reactionaries before he is too powerful to kill. And surgical masks are on a six month backlog, companies who make them not having the production capability to meet demand. This will likely be a season of panic.
Yes. The world is falling apart, and we are all going to die. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Let’s talk about just one of those things: the Coronavirus. It is also known as COVID-19, meaning Corona Virus Disease from year 2019. Does this mean that there is a COVID-18? Probably and a COVID 17. Here’s a nice explainer from the World Health Organization about the family of viruses known as “Coronavirus”, which thankfully is not controlled by the Trump Administration, who insists that ALL virus talk doesn’t blame him or Russia, whatever else it says.
What is the Coronavirus?
There really is a world encompassing pandemic, and it is already here. It is among you, and chances are, it has been with us for more than a month. And the thing is: you didn’t even know it was here. How could you have? These little things, these viruses are invisible to the eye. But in fact, its likely that you have had some sort of exposure to Coronavirus before: If you have had a common cold, the kind you do not use anti-biotics for, but do things like eat chicken soup and take hot showers and sleep for, then you have probably had Coronavirus before. If you got SARS before, you definitely have.
It gets a little scarier if you realize that Coronavirus transmit from animals to humans (they are zoonotic) and that there are a number of these things which we know of that have not YET made the jump between animals and humans! But: they probably will and so we will be doing this for the foreseeable future.
So Coronavirus is nothing new. What is new is that this one is particularly contagious, and this version is not well understood, so there is no treatment for it, yet. According to CBS News, as of today, it accounts for 3100 deaths worldwide. Doing the math, that is an infinitesimally small number of people compared to the total number of people on the planet, but I imagine you would not want to be one of those people. The fact is: Scientists simply do not understand the disease well enough to build a model of its transmission and mortality profiles to know how it spreads or who it will kill, so they do not know how to protect the uninfected, or how to treat the infected to keep them from dying. This makes it a “novel coronavirus” which means, it is simply not well understood.
But, there is some hope in this as well. People can get the infection and never know it. The effects on human physiology are such that some will die from it, while others will have it and not even know it. What they do know is that far more people have been exposed to it than we have any idea about, and the risks to your OWN individual health and safety are marginal.
The main thing that people can do then is to not share their germs. Hand washing right now is the most important thing a person can do to limit their own exposure. And to keep from transmitting it, cough and sneeze away from others, wash your hands (again) and make sure that if you are ill you stay at home, and don’t go out into public. That last part will be hard for the VAST majority of American workers who can’t afford to get sick and miss days because missing days might mean they don’t make rent this month, and/or their rotten capitalist boss fires them. But they can still take other steps to keep from spreading their illness, if they are forced (yeah… that’s the right word) to work. Taking these steps will ensure that if you don’t have the virus, you will reduce the likelihood that you get it and if you have it, at least you won’t take anyone else down with you.
The President as a Source of Mis/Disinformation
But: the BEST thing you can do for yourself — and this advice applies in many areas of life, not just epidemiology — is to first of all NOT listen to the absolutely uninformed and completely politically motivated President of the United States, who doesn’t know a virus from a hole in the ground, and is primarily interested in spreading misinformation that is designed specifically to make him look good in this crisis. He is a cynical, crass moron, who has, for some bizarre reason, been given a huge megaphone and apparently ultimate authority over government policy. Such people should not be trusted, not in peacetime and certainly not in wartime. Nor should we trust the words of his appointed coronavirus stooge in chief, the Vice President of the United States, whose job it is to make his boss look good in all of this.
Neither of these two men care much for science or facts, and as evidenced, Trump continues to claim that warm weather will make it miraculously disappear. We know it will not disappear: Coronavirus, as I described above, has been with us as long as there have been viruses, and will likely revisit us in the near future.
Trump also suggests that his strategy to combat the spread of the virus is a new vaccine, which he is touting as the cure-all to this problem. He even suggested that the virus could be “cured”, as if you could “cure” a virus. He urged pharmaceutical industries to accelerate their pace in development of this new drug and speed it to market. The request was so ridiculous, that the spokesman for the health task force, Dr. Anthony Fauci from the NIH, had to immediately step in and correct the President, saying that a deployable vaccine, in the best conditions, was a year away, but that assumes that the people developing the drug understood it, and they do not. Here is Fauci’s statement, fact-checking the President in real time.
The fact that Trump 1) doesn’t have the first clue what he is talking about, 2) is getting his information from political handlers who are more focused on his reelection than on his actually doing his job, and 3) that so many people still look to him for information is that there is a much more insidious effort running parallel and, perhaps in support of the President’s effort to confuse and propagandize the US. This activity is being run by online actors, who are involved in relatively shady activities. One of these groups, known as QAnon, who are involved in propagating misinformation on the internet about Coronavirus, seem to be working at odds with the science of epidemiology, and as such, are amplifying the official misinformation coming from the President’s Office. Trump benefits from their activities directly, and frequently makes oblique, obvious but easily deniable references to their and their movement.
QAnon and the Coronavirus
Who is QAnon? Well, they are first and foremost, a looseknit internet collective who largely operate on 8chan, and are led by someone that the group calls “Q”. QAnon believes in things that you have likely never heard anything about. Some would call them “conspiracy theorists” and some have turned to violence (such as the person who killed 9 people a week and a half ago in Germany,) but giving them the benefit of the doubt, I would say they had some very outside of the mainstream beliefs about the President, pizza restaurants, and what they and their mouthpieces in the Trump Administration call “the Deep State”. I’m not going to discuss the validity of their theories: personally, I think they are rather bonkers. But, if you really need to read about them, here is the Wikipedia article on them. I have no doubt that they had a hand in editing it, so it is probably at least correct with regard to the details.
I bring them in because apparently, they are telling people to drink bleach to fight the coronavirus. And forgive my candidness, but I’m all like “What… The… F — k?!” I’ll leave alone that while bleach kills bacteria and viruses pretty effectively when used in like a 1–2% solution on counters and such, and would likely kill off most, if not all bacteria in a human’s digestive tract, Coronavirus lives in a person’s lungs and in his blood. So, while bleach would kill helpful gut bacteria pretty effectively, it would also kill the drinker dead, and not even touch the coronavirus.
This solution, which is also advocated by genuine menaces to our society, the anti-vax nutjobs, is for those suffering from coronavirus to drink some stuff that is literally called “Miracle Mineral Solution”. If you think this sounds like the oversell-underpreform snake oil concoctions of the Old West, you would be right. This stuff is suppose to kill all viruses on contact. Rolling Stone also details a prescription from QAnon folks to take colloidal silver (?) and then use this MMS stuff to ward off the harmful effects to skin, liver and kidneys.
Whoever is selling MMS is probably making a “killing” (excuse the pun) but apparently, there are instructions on the internet which would be very irresponsible of me to link, where you can make your own! There are also recipes for jet fuel, explosives, homemade LSD, and thermonuclear devices online. Luckily (hopefully) reasonable people will never need to know how to make any of that stuff, and will never go searching for those recipes. But we also live in a society with a completely broken mental health system, and millions of undiagnosed lunatics wandering about freely. Many of them happen to subscribe to QAnon theory. (And if you aren’t one of those lunatics, don’t write me and tell me so: That last sentence obviously did not apply to you!)
Chaos is the Point
QAnon is not the only right-wing association pushing misinformation about Coronavirus. Mediamatters offers us a fairly comprehensive list of bizarre and sometimes outright racist nonsense that people have come up with to “explain” that which is, as of yet, inexplicable. Among some of them was that COVID-19 was created in a Chinese lab specifically to conduct some sort of nefarious ends, or that people were eating bats in China, or that it was created and patented by Bill Gates, to… uh, get people to buy PCs over Macs and then give all their money to the poor? The one favored by the Trump administration and his Rightist allies in Right Wing Media, is that either the virus is a hoax and is being used by Democrats to sink the stock market and make him look bad, or a plot by the Deep State to produce the same effect.
There is an end to all of this, as in a purpose to it. There is some evidence that people associated with QAnon are attempting to cash in, both monetarily and politically, on the misinformation, and ensuing panic. We know that the President frequently traffics in conspiracy nonsense and factless claims all the time. We know that his cult followers love the stuff, and really enjoy it, apparently, when he promotes their favorite ones from onstage at his insipidly incessant rallies. And we also now know that some are promoting this strange misinformation for the purpose of gaining followers on social media. (Think Tide Pods, folks. Nobody ever actually ate Tide Pods until the corporate press freaked out about the new danger to our precious children, and then what was a meme in a niche corner of the internet gained national attention and idiots began trying them.)
But the real purpose is to sew distrust and chaos in the United States. Jeb Bush famously called Donald Trump the Chaos President and apparently, he was the only Republican contender for President in 2016 with enough integrity to not join in the chaos as a loyal devotee of the President’s Personality Cult. Unlike Mr. Bush, though, the chaos and distrust has filtered down to the people of this nation. Recently, one Trump supporter claimed to not believe that Coronavirus even existed because she has bought into the President’s argument that this is just another Democratic Hoax. Now, granted: It is wise to take a measured approach to dealing with the virus. But denialism is a different thing all together.
If chaos truly is the point, as the Times wrote of Russian chaos efforts in the US around the election, then these people are feeding it. What Americans need right now is a sober hand on the tiller, one who is willing to let people who know something about the questions they are being asked answer them. If the President doesn’t have the correct information, the best thing he could do for the nation is to shut up, and encourage his cult followers to be calm and listen to people who are actually trying to resolve the problem. While that won’t score him any political points, and will keep him off the television for a while…
(Ding ding ding)
There you have the real answer, folks. This is the real reason the President is going on television, and his supporters are taking to social media, and spouting nonsense, misinformation and conspiracy theory. The whole point is not chaos, but keeping a megalomaniac in power. If he can gain a quarter of a percent of a vote in one precinct, nothing is beneath Trump to try to accomplish that. And if he can stoke panic to monopolize the airwaves and take attention off other people, be it his own people or Democrats who are in the middle of a contentious primary battle, you better believe he will try.
Some Resources for actual information
The best way to get good information then, dear reader, is to black him out of your media diet. Turn off the stations covering his speeches. Do not attend his rallies. Find better sources, like the CDC’s website who are providing updated information, (though there is some evidence that this information is being tampered with.) or the National Institutes of Health or the World Health Organization, which I linked above. All of these organizations are made up of doctors and scientists who are actually trying to get ahead of the virus, to understand it, and then to begin treating it. Or you could do as the pretty thin-gruel of a satire at the NewYorker suggests and quarantine Mike Pence.
At any rate. Just understand. We are in line for a pandemic. It likely won’t be nearly as bad as it is being made out to be and there are some very simple things that you can do right now to avoid getting sick, such as handwashing and not rubbing your eyes. None of the solutions that work involve drinking bleach or eating dustified silver. Most of the information about it, especially from Right Wing sources, is at least misleading, and at most, downright deadly. And there are actual sources for information that you can use to learn more about it, as well as seeing some tips to help you avoid getting sick or stay alive if you do.
I leave you with a clip from “Airplane II”. Its oddly prescient.
Like all articles on The New Haberdasher, this story is presented to you for free. If you like what I do, consider supporting my work with a small monetary contribution at my Patreon and thank you.
