... Now, the administration is questioning reality ...
05.08.2020 01:05 PM
... The first wave of attacks from coronavirus truthers, sniping at the models that predicted a catastrophe, were eerily similar to those used by climate change skeptics: They started by denying the forecasts, then shifted into claims about how the costs of containment would outweigh the benefits. But those tactics, which pitted current sacrifice against potential future calamity, no longer fit the situation on the ground. If you’re saying climate change will never be a problem, you might not live long enough to find out that you’re wrong. But if you said a few months ago that Covid-19 wouldn’t be a big deal in the US, well, you’ve already been debunked.
Sure, it’s possible that death-toll trutherism will crumble if states ease restrictions prematurely, and infection rates shoot up. But one should never underestimate the president’s ability, aided by Fox News, to shape his supporters’ perceptions of reality. According to a daily tracking poll by Civiqs, Republicans’ level of concern over local outbreaks peaked in early April and has plummeted over the past month, even in states that have seen a sharp increase in cases over that span. Add the disturbing fact that coronavirus deaths are disproportionately concentrated among African Americans, and it’s possible to imagine a real split emerging over the basic, if necessarily murky, question of how many people have died.
Then there’s the matter of who’s responsible for however many deaths the president concedes did happen. Like a lawyer pleading in the alternative, Trump has always presented parallel theories to the American jury: the situation isn’t as bad as everyone says; but then again, the bad situation isn’t his fault. As part of an effort to promote the latter argument, the White House has promoted a questionable origin story for the pandemic that blames it on Chinese mismanagement or malfeasance. On Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told ABC’s Martha Raddatz that he’d seen “a significant amount of evidence” that the outbreak originated in a research lab in Wuhan, and hinted that it might have been intentionally released. A few days later, he declared that “China could have prevented the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide” ...
This presents a delicate challenge for would-be debunkers. It’s tempting to confront misleading claims with their exact opposite—yes, the official death count is precisely accurate; no, we know for sure that the virus didn’t originate in a lab—but those claims aren’t true, either. Meanwhile, picking fights about the past—how many people have already died, where the virus got its start—gives cover for the truthers’ shift in tactics. It no longer works to say the experts are panicked over nothing. Covid models aren’t great, but in the broadest sense they’ve been correct: The new coronavirus did arrive in the US, and tens of thousands or more have already died. Desperate claims to the contrary were destined to be disproven. But when it comes to arguing with skeptics over what has already happened, we can’t just wait them out.
https://www.wired.com/story/as-deaths-mount-trumps-disinformation-strategy-will-adapt/
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