COVID-19: Know Your Sources Of Information

I certainly realize that the management of the COVID-19 pandemic is a complicated task, to say the least. The parties in authority have to juggle the competing needs of public health and economics. That said, conservative media is aggressively promoting information that is more magical ideology than science.

Today I was listening to a podcast from "Hank Unplugged" (a conservative Christian production) that is emblematic of what I am talking about. It was an interview with Jay Richards talking about his new book entitled, "The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe". I don't know about you, but having "the tyranny of experts" in the sub-title raises my bullsh!t detector. I will let one reviewer of the book speak for me:

• "Don't believe this propaganda. Jay W. Richards is a low-level business professor, Douglas Axe is a molecular biologist, and his research area is proving that God designed the world, and William Briggs is a minor statistician working to prove Libertarian ideas through the magic of statistics. None are public health experts, none are medical doctors and they have a major agenda to support Trump and the bonkers idea of herd immunity, which would lead to hundreds of thousands more deaths before a vaccine is widely available."

BTW, Jay Richards is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, which is "a politically conservative[4][5][6] non-profit think tank based in Seattle, Washington, that advocates the pseudoscientific concept[7][8][9] of intelligent design (ID)" (link). He also is a major force within the Great Barrington Declaration, which promotes, among other pseudoscience, herd immunity for COVID-19 (click here for more).