Once again, the disinformation surrounding COVID is growing online and none of it is true.
Update as of 9.15.23: Colorado Rep. Ken DeGraaf (R-Colorado Springs) has been on social media to warn people against the use of vaccinations or masks. Among the worst pieces of disinformation he is spreading is a ridiculous lie: that if those who have had COVID-19 vaccines are near fertile women they can make them sterile. This is nonsense. Hundreds of millions of peopel have now taken COVID vaccines and tehy are just fine.
Here’s the claim we began by refuting: the false claim rolling out across right-leaning social media is that COVID-19 only spikes during election seasons.
Well, the 2024 presidential race is entering the fall primary season. Some on social media are not just trying to tie elections to waves of COVID-19, they are falsely claiming that the virus isn’t real — and is a tool to control the outcome of the election.
Fact: No less than the Associated Press (AP) confirmed with epidemiology experts that there is no connection between rising COVID-19 cases and the electoral process. Repeat: none.
In an effort to dispute what it calls “widespread misinformation, the AP has instituted a process providing factual context to misleading content that is circulating online via their News Verification desk. Learn more about fact-checking at AP. Ark Valley Voice applauds this step, which matches our own fact-based journalistic ethics.
The AP noted a disinformation example under an Instagram headline: “Some won’t figure out the Mysterious Connection between The Coronavirus & The Election!!! It’s Called Election Interference by Mail-In Ballots & the Machines. Wake-Up America.” Below it, a second caption on the post states: “Imagine a virus so smart it only attacks during election season.”
COVID-19 arrived in the U.S. in January, 2020 and since that time, cases have increased near the end of each year. But — and here’s the thing — they have also spiked during the summer season; most likely because people are bound and determined to go have a little fun, so they travel and congregate and celebrate. That has nothing to do with elections.
According to the AP, “data from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention shows that the largest spike occurred the week ending Jan. 8, 2022, when 30.5 percent of reported COVID-19 tests came back positive. By contrast, cases had been decreasing in the lead-up to the off-year election on Nov. 2, 2021, a few months prior.”
I was working as a paramedic during the start of the pandemic as my full time job. On my days off I was working in a Covid homeless shelter in Denver. I can not express the frustration I felt when I worked here people telling me that COVID wasn’t real. They would completely discount the experience I was living in a daily basis. I believe the worst thing we have done was to politicize a public health emergency.
The worst thing “we” have done? “We”?
I hope you wanted to say something more along the lines of “the worst thing republicans have done is to politicize a public health emergency”, because that is what happened.
Don’t ask me to feel sorry for the rightwing morons who sabotaged any chance to effectively contain the virus early on. They bought their ticket and they rode the ride, and if they died from Covid as a result of their embrace of rightwing idiocy, all I can say is, too bad, so sad, and good riddance.