Dr. Drew Pinsky has condoned flouting the directives of public health officials.
Credit: Rich Fury/Getty
Misinformation about the coronavirus continues to circulate across swaths of the American media — on popular podcasts, in blog posts, in online videos and on prime-time cable news shows — as recently as this week.
Some of the disseminators are entertainers. Others are medical doctors. Some are conservatives who insist the virus is being hyped for political purposes. One is a comedian with no medical training who has raised doubts about vaccinating children.
Even as President Trump and the federal government’s top public health officials warn that the virus is not something to be taken lightly — and the authorities reported more coronavirus deaths in the United States on Wednesday — these commentators make misleading comments, cherry-pick facts and go so far as to claim that the virus could be a hoax or a North Korean plot.
Dr. Drew and Rob Schneider scoff at staying home.
Dr. Drew Pinsky, the […]
President Trump answers questions at the Capitol on March 10, 2020, in Washington, DC. Forty percent of Republicans say they are worried about the coronavirus. Credit: Win McNamee/Getty
A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll has revealed sharp partisan divides between Americans over the coronavirus pandemic.
The poll found 68 percent of Democrats are worried that someone in their family could catch the virus, while just 40 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of independents share that concern.
The gulf in perception over an outwardly nonpolitical issue underscores how signals from politicians and media outlets have played a critical role in shaping how seriously Americans are taking a viral outbreak that has overwhelmed health care systems and triggered mass quarantines in several countries around the world.
Nearly 80 percent of Democrats believe the worst is yet to come, but just 40 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of independents believe that. Overall, 53 percent of all voters are concerned that someone in their immediate family might contract the coronavirus, and 60 percent believe the worst is […]
Credit: The Washington Post/Getty
In a pair of little-noticed letters sent earlier this year, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and five other Democratic senators asked two giant organizations crucial to keeping the country’s housing market running how they were preparing for the destructive power of climate change. “If we are underprepared, climate change could have particularly devastating impacts on the individuals and communities who can least afford it,” the letter warned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-supported companies that back roughly half of the country’s $10 trillion mortgage market.
The financial world and those responsible for regulating it have been waking up to the threat posed by global warming. Earlier this year, the head of the world’s largest investment firm, BlackRock, said that climate change is causing a “fundamental reshaping of finance.”
And as investors, bankers, and others in finance accept that they must rethink how they operate, some insurance companies and lenders are responding by reducing their risks to flooding, wildfires, and other natural disasters. It’s a shift likely to […]
The Fed can close banks to quarantine financial crises but the US can’t close workplaces because the nation’s social insurance system depends on people going to work.
Credit: Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto/Getty
Dr. Anthony S Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and just about the only official in the Trump administration trusted to tell the truth about the coronavirus, said last Thursday: “The system does not, is not really geared to what we need right now … It is a failing, let’s admit it.”
While we’re at it, let’s admit something more basic. The system would be failing even under a halfway competent president. The dirty little secret, which will soon become apparent to all, is that there is no real public health system in the United States.
The ad hoc response fashioned late Friday by House Democrats and the White House may help a bit, although it’s skimpy, as I’ll explain.
Instead of a public health system, we have a private for-profit system for individuals lucky enough to afford it […]
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