Instead of discussing the second indictment over Donald Trump on Tuesday night, the presenter addressed the pandemic, arguing that orthodoxy around masks and social distance had developed without explanation and that any disagreement was immediately silenced.
“What about this vaccine?” He asked. ‘Why are Americans discouraged from asking simple, straightforward questions about it? How effective are these drugs? Are they safe? For example, what is the risk of miscarriage for pregnant women? Is there a study on it? May we see it? And by the way, how much do the drug companies earn this good?
“There is no QAnon to such questions,” he continued. ‘These are not conspiracy theories, these are the most basic questions. In a democracy, every citizen has the right to know the answer, but instead we got fluff and propaganda.
‘The media rollout for the vaccine came off like a diet Pepsi ad at the Super Bowl. Numerous celebrity notes, not much science. ”
Mr. Carlson did not openly question the vaccines themselves, agreeing that most Americans supported them as they saw the beneficial effects of polio, tetanus and chickenpox, but attacked “the way the authorities handle the coronavirus vaccine” and said it “does not inspire confidence.”
‘If the vaccine was that big, why are all these people lying about it? Honest question. And they lied. It is clear that they lied. You know this for sure because the most powerful people in America have been working since the moment the Covid vaccine arrived to make sure no one can criticize it. ”
He then criticized vaccine advocate Melinda Gates, the wife of Bill Gates, a billionaire founder of Microsoft, who appeared in a CNN interview in December in which she said that social media has a moral responsibility to -vaxxer conspiracy theories – and pointed to the removal of a Facebook group called “COVID-19 Vaccine Injury Stories”.
The host then contradicts his own anti-censorship argument somewhat by referring to a recent New York Times article reporting that Covid vaccines can cause blood disorders in certain cases, a story that remains available online, on Facebook and on Twitter.
While Tucker Carlson’s argument had more to do with the attack on gatekeepers in Silicon Valley than to explicitly doubt vaccines, he said he intended to accept the jab himself and his employer, Rupert Murdoch, already had his – his defense of the right to question medical expertise. follows a pattern among U.S. conservative media that has enchanted the anti-vaxxer movement since the beginning of the pandemic.
Recently, his Fox colleague Laura Ingraham used her Quake Media podcast to interview Robert F Kennedy Jr., son of the fallen presidential candidate and U.S. Attorney General, who took the opportunity to introduce the country’s leading expert on infectious diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, to attack by calling him ‘a very sinister guy who surrendered this country to Big Pharma’ and ‘the J Edgar Hoover of public health’.
“Tony Fauci has arranged for all these vaccines to be granted immunity from liability, so no matter how negligent the company is, no matter how toxic the ingredients are, no matter how reckless it is, no matter how serious you are. injury or death, you can not sue, “he said.
On the topic of mass vaccination strategies to pursue herd immunity, Mr Kennedy asked, “You need to give 300,000 vaccines to prevent one death – how many deaths are you going to cause in that group?”
Another Fox host, Sean Hannity, said in his program on January 26 that he “begins to doubt” whether he will get the vaccine in person because half of his friends will not take it in a million years and he will not do not know who to listen to. ‘
Evangelical pastors, including Rodney Howard-Browne and Guillermo Maldonado, have also expressed similar skepticism online. The former claims in April that vaccines kill more people than viruses, and the latter said in December that vaccines prepare the structure for the Antichrist.
On the pandemic more generally, Fox challenger One America News ran a segment in May 2020, claiming that coronavirus was a “globalist conspiracy” born of the elite to ensure that US President Donald Trump does not re-elect is not, citing controversial medical researcher Judy Mikovits, who contributed to the widely discredited Pandemic viral video, which made similar hysterical allegations.
Although the arguments of mr. Carlson against Big Tech may be reasonable, his accusation that medical authorities are ‘lying’ to the American public could further undermine confidence if the pandemic has already claimed and counted 468,000 American lives.
The new US president, Joe Biden, and his deputy Kamala Harris, as well as celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, have pointed out that they are publicly receiving their turn to counter public safety concerns, while organizations such as International SOS have published guidelines for fact-checking has to counter online myth-making. about vaccines.