Pfizer announced positive trial results for their coronavirus vaccine today. That’s great news, but it’s undermined when Dems & others have pushed a conspiracy that, because Orange Man Bad, the vaccine won’t work.
Don’t remember? Well follow me down memory lane.👇
Perhaps the most well-known anti-vaccine voice on this was @KamalaHarris, who kicked up a firestorm when she suggested she wouldn’t trust or take a vaccine coming out of the Trump Administration.
But she wasn’t alone.
Where bad and dangerous coronavirus ideas go, @NYGovCuomo is never far behind. By now you’ve surely heard of his comments that it’s “bad news” that we got a vaccine during the Trump Admin. Just a vile comment.
But what you may not remember is that @NYGovCuomo has been saying since September that he doesn’t trust the president or the FDA (!!) about a vaccine.
You may be familiar with one @JoeBiden, who shared a similar perspective as his running mate.
Just look at that @nytimes headline (which is sure to go down the memoryhole eventually) and tell me that perspective is fine and dandy.
We had a similar lack of confidence on Capitol Hill. Here’s @TinaSmithMN, suggesting that political pressure would undermine a safe and effective vaccine.
To be clear, this can only rightly be called a conspiracy theory.
We had some former electeds, too. Surely you remember @KatieHill4CA?
She suggested - again, as with all of these, absent evidence - that a vaccine approved by the Trump Admin couldn’t be trusted.
This tweet from @DavidJollyFL is presented without comment.
We also had some almost politicians, including @CalforNC, who suggested that he would be “hesitant” to receive a vaccination, approved by the most advanced medical oversight body in the world, during a global pandemic.
The media didn’t help.
Some of them, like @ForeignPolicy, were very clear about what they thought of a vaccine approved by a Trump Administration. This one from @Laurie_Garrett.
Check out that highlighted line.
You won’t be surprised to see the media’s chief conspiracymonger, @JoyAnnReid, get in on this one.
She went from lambasting POTUS for not caring to find a vaccine in May to suggesting *this morning* that she wouldn’t have trusted one anyway.
“Trump’s Operation Warp Speed is an election ploy” is...not a quote that has held up particularly well, @juliettekayyem.
We saw the same sentiment elsewhere. Here’s @sbg1, talking to @OliviaTroye, suggesting an ineffective or unsafe vaccine would be rushed out before Election Day.
Hope the fear-porn clicks were worth it for @NewYorker.
Across the street at @NYMag we got the same perspective from @jonathanchait, a man who has never seen a left-wing conspiracy theory he didn’t like.
We could’ve expected that sentiment would extend to Trump’s killer vaccine push.
It wasn’t quite a banner couple of weeks for the opinion pages, either. Here’s one from @USATODAY, written by Jason Sattler.
And plenty of blue checks jumped in to defend the Democrats and the media.
Here’s @AprilDRyan excusing Harris’s comments by pivoting to...Trump and Pence, as ever.
Two rights and a wrong and all that.
And many just flat out gaslit their audience around what various electeds had said.
Here’s @kylegriffin1 pretending that Biden didn’t say what he said above.
This is, regrettably, only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to lefty bluechecks undermining confidence in the vaccine.
Leading the charge is the increasingly unhinged @tribelaw, who suggested the virus was as lethal as drinking Lysol.
We had all of Twitter’s favorite doctors behind the idea that Trump was going to push through a vaccine. Here’s @DrEricDing.
We also saw a lot of the usual suspects. @donwinslow is proving more and more reliable on this front.
These tweets were pretty shameful.
Welcome back to the program, @CheriJacobus, who pushed the same conspiracy that Trump was going to rush through an unsafe vaccine right before the election (which, I will remind you, is now in the past).
It should go without saying, but undermining trust in a vaccine in the midst of a global pandemic to score political points or clicks is absolutely ghastly.
Now that we’re knocking on the door of a vaccine, will these people be held to account for undermining trust?
I doubt it.
If our media had any dignity, this never would have been allowed to stand when it first happened.
But now that events have shredded all these contentions? It’s absolute malpractice that the media ignores it.
This will get people killed. There’s no way around it.
For those new to the threads, I don’t have anything to sell or subscribe to, but food banks are still hurting from the lockdown. If you’re in DC like me, Capitol Area Food Bank is a great organization to help your neighbors in need: capitalareafoodbank.org
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The new book “Original Sin” from Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson recounts the effort to cover up Biden’s cognitive decline ahead of the election. The authors point to many guilty parties.
The one glaring omission? Their colleagues in the corporate press. Follow along ⤵️
There are numerous dramatic reveals. The Biden team considered condoning him to a wheelchair? Maybe in his fog he forgot about the border?
But as I worked on a review for @commonplc, the one thought that I kept coming back to was that you can’t tell this story without the press.
Perhaps no one was more vital to the continued fiction that Biden had it together than the media.
Tapper and Thompson even highlight some of the telling moments.
Biden’s cancer diagnosis is a tragedy I know first-hand.
But our sympathy can’t silence questions about Biden’s cognitive decline, clarified just days ago by the Hur tape.
The media tried to bury the story then. They’re trying again now.
I’ve got the receipts. ⤵️
When the report first came out in 2024, outlets rushed to demean Hur, accusing him of serving as a Republican hatchet man.
Just look at this take from @USATODAY, who assembled sympathetic voices to make the case that Hur “crossed the line.” They found an expert to call it a “disgrace” and then featured the obviously unbiased Eric Holder to lead a section titled “Way too many gratuitous remarks.”
The audio makes clear that Hur, if anything, played down how alarming the claims were.
(If you haven’t listened to the Hur audio yet, you should.)
It should go without saying, but the media cultivating this type of baseless hysteria about an admin for partisan reasons is much more of a threat to the underpinnings of our democracy than anything Trump has actually done.
Quick 🧵⤵️
A couple quotes:
“If you think that there’s this thing out there called America, and it’s exceptional, that means you don’t have to do anything” to stop fascism.
What? What does that even mean??
That if you, like millions of Americans!, believe in American exceptionalism…you’re a fascist?
Really?
“The powers that be can do whatever they want to you”
Trump can’t even deport people who have deportation orders against them without a federal judge stepping in.
Many in the media are trying to claim that the press was merely duped by Biden’s White House about the former president’s cognitive decline.
That simply isn’t true. The media actively took part in the coverup.
Don’t let them forget. I’ve got screenshots. ⤵️
I’ve done a number of threads on this but putting some of the most egregious stuff in one place.
Perhaps the most damming: Two weeks before the debate made Biden’s cognitive decline inescapable, @washingtonpost gave “Four Pinocchio’s” to allegedly edited videos showing Biden clearly displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype” while quoting the White House to say the videos were “cheap fakes” — all to defend Biden against criticisms about his age and well-being.
That story came four days after a previous effort from @washingtonpost to write off these videos as Republican efforts to mislead voters: proof, the Post claimed, that “the politics of misinformation and conspiracy theories do not stop at the waters edge.”
I’m not sure people realize just how egregious some of NPR’s “journalism” has been. Amid the debate about defunding the network, I wanted to walk down memory lane to revisit some of its worst coverage.
There’s a lot. ⤵️
First, perhaps the most egregious display of activist journalism: their response to the Hunter Biden laptop story of corruption involving a major party candidate on the eve of the election.
Not only did @NPR not cover it, they bragged about refusing to do so.
Insofar as @NPR did cover the Hunter Biden scandal, they actively tried to cover it up.
They applauded Facebook & Twitter strangling the story as part of a push against “misinformation and conspiracy theories.”
The story, of course, turned out to be far from invented.