Thread by @LongDesertTrain

1/ Monica Gandhi is living proof that, if you tell people what they want to hear, you will never lack for an audience, nor will you ever run out of major media outlets eager to disseminate your tripe—even if you've been embarrassingly wrong again and again and again.

https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1477612813098962950

2/ Gandhi has been minimizing the continuing threat of Covid and campaigning against mitigations and testing for many months now. She literally used the phrase "Delta variant, delta shmariant," at the end of an interview in late June. slate.com/technology/202…

3/ In the same interview, Gandhi's determination to purvey hopium, no matter the facts, led her to make the following remarkable—and false—statement about HIV. "I knew something else from HIV, which is that a virus can't keep on mutating forever."

https://twitter.com/jeremyfaust/status/1454243290606362624

4/ After being an outspoken pro-mask voice early in the pandemic—so much so that she absurdly proposed wearing a masks as a form of variolation—Gandhi has abruptly turned against them. Here she is cutting a ribbon of masks on June 15 to celebrate our liberation from Covid.

5/ Then on July 6, Gandhi penned an op-ed for SFGate: "Delta variant panic could cause more harm than good."

It featured one of MG's favorite themes: cases had been decoupled from hospitalizations. This "decoupling" has occurred approximately 500 times. sfgate.com/politics-op-ed…

6/ Months earlier, in February 2021, before Delta began its murderous rampage across India, Gandhi made a bold prediction on the state of the pandemic in India: they had reached herd immunity.

7/ Lest one think Gandhi was chastened after such a disastrous track record of predictions, she unleashed this one in a Sept 4 WaPo article: "I truly, truly think we are in the endgame. Cases will start plummeting in mid- to late September..." washingtonpost.com/politics/covid…

8/ We are told that viruses "mutate quickly, always at a cost to themselves," weakening over time. This after studies in England, Scotland, & Denmark had shown Delta was 2-2.5x more likely to require hospitalization than Alpha—itself 60% more lethal than previous variants.

9/ Links to Delta hospitalization studies + tweet from @EricTopol describing four studies that all found ~60% higher lethality with Alpha.
thelancet.com/journals/lanin…
thelancet.com/journals/lance…
thelancet.com/journals/lanin…

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1377358072314654720

10/ I've only touched on Gandhi's atrocious track record. For more analysis, see this excellent piece by @JHowardBrainMD discussing Gandhi & other purveyors of Covid-related misinformation. "Contrarian Doctors: The Pandemic is Over, Again." sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-pandemic-i…

11/ Despite this singularly dismal track record, Gandhi continues to be featured on major media. Any message congenial to the wealthy (AKA "the Economy"), no matter how asinine, is welcomed by major media outlets.

https://twitter.com/JHowardBrainMD/status/1454212538204401670

12/ Another version of this phenomenon played out over the past 15+ years in the form of military "experts" w/a record of near-100% failure of judgment—wrong on Iraq War, WMD, Afghanistan, etc—featured regularly on major TV news networks @FAIRmediawatch fair.org/take-action/ac…

13/ ...even as anti-war voices, who got the Iraq War right, continue to be shut out from debate. Similarly, we see the likes of Gandhi & supine Biden admin lackeys Fauci & Ashish Jha featured on major networks, but not critical voices like @CT_Bergstrom, @gregggonsalves, etc.

14/ All this is confirmation of Noam Chomsky's propaganda model of the mass media, as articulated in Manufacturing Consent. Given the economic & political structure in which the major media operate, their servile devotion to the interests of capital is hardly surprising.