Dr. Drew Pinsky has had enough. He’s had it with the media’s coronavirus coverage. Don’t get me wrong, 100,000-pus cases and over 3,000 deaths are terrible. It’s tragic for the families of the victims, but this isn’t Ebola. This isn’t anything on the scale of Spanish Flu. In fact, this current coronavirus outbreak pales in comparison to the flu numbers that are recorded annually. To put it into perspective, the swine flu pandemic which occurred in 2009, killed nearly 400,000 people and infected some 200 million people. On average, around 20,000 people are killed by the flu in the U.S. every year. The infection rate: anywhere from 300 million to 1 billion worldwide.
Dr. Drew Pinksy has just had enough. He’s tired of the hysteria, which he noted was media-made. Real Clear Politics has the clip and the transcript:
PINSKY: I don’t know what they’re talking about. We used to point at the way Indiana responded to the opiate and the HIV epidemic as the model for the country. I don’t know what they’re talking about. The only reason I felt comfortable with Pence as Vice President was I was aware of his track record in Indiana in handling these serious problems, and they handled them better than most states did, almost any other state. So, I don’t know what the hell people are talking about. That is fake news...
We have in the United States 24 million cases of flu-like illness, 180,000 hospitalizations, 16,000 dead from influenza. We have zero deaths from coronavirus. We have almost no cases. There are people walking around out there with the virus that don’t even know they have it, it’s so mild. So it’s going to be much more widespread than we knew. It’s going to be much milder than we knew. The 1.7% fatality rate is going to fall. Where was the press during the Mediterranean Corona outbreak, where the fatality rate was 41%? Why didn’t they get crazed about MERS or SARS? This is an overblown press-created hysteria. This thing is well in hand. President Trump is absolutely correct.
Now, a slight correction, we have had four deaths in the Seattle area from this virus reported today, but again—the numbers tell that this disease is far less lethal than what we experience every year during flu season.
This isn’t an apocalyptic viral infection. This isn’t 28 Days (or Weeks) Later. Now, people are freaking out. This stuff is scary, but when you read the raw numbers, this is minor league compared to the seasonal flu that is more deadly. Still, the liberal media isn’t wasting any time trying to turn this crisis into Donald Trump’s Katrina moment. They want fear to spread. They want the Dow Jones to fall—and it did last week, plunging over 3,000 points and wiping out trillions (on paper) from the books. The Dow did rally to a 1,200-point gain today. It’s the largest one-day point gain ever.
It’s sad, but the professional Left is rooting for the disease to win. Beating Trump at all costs is the game, even if that means blowing up a disease where a shockingly high amount of those infected are asymptomatic.
