Michael Savage and the Health Ranger both blast scientific illiteracy of conservative media in coronavirus coverage
by: Mike Adams
NaturalNews.com
Thursday, April 16, 2020
For the last two months, I’ve been fighting scientific illiteracy among the pro-Trump, “conservative” independent media, highlighting the extraordinary examples of bad math and deceptive, biased reporting by numerous conservative pundits and radio hosts who are spreading dangerously bad disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. It turns out I’m not alone.
Conservative radio host Michael Savage, who has a PhD in epidemiology, has encountered the same astonishing science illiteracy as he observes the things being said by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other conservatives who demonstrate an extraordinary lack of basic science and medical knowledge in their coronavirus coverage.
As the Chicago Tribune now reports:
…[F]or the past two months, listeners to Savage’s conservative radio show have heard him howl with unabated contempt about another menace: “The pimps” in the right-wing media “who tell you what you want to hear.” They are “intellectual dwarfs” and “science illiterates,” he says, who spent weeks downplaying the threat from the coronavirus epidemic and accusing President Donald Trump’s opponents of exaggerating it to hurt him politically.
Savage has attacked the credibility of the conservative media, accused its biggest stars of being too rote and unthinking in their defense of the president, and demanded that they be held accountable for misleading millions of Americans.
“We’re living in a terrible time in America where truth has died,” Savage, who was one of the first conservative media stars to urge Trump to run for president, told his audience. “This is crazy,” he added, pointing to the way the president’s defenders always accuse the left of spreading “fake news.”
“How can we not let our side be called on the carpet when they lie to the people?”
His contempt for hosts like Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, whose top-rated radio shows draw more than 30 million listeners each week, is especially searing. He mocks them as “Dr. Hannity” and “Rush Limbaugh, M.D., Ph.D.,” belittles their lack of education compared with his, and berates people who took their claims seriously.
Michael Savage really is smarter and better informed than the rest of the conservative “influencers”
Back in February, as I was guest hosting the Alex Jones Show, which has featured a wide array of guests on the coronavirus subject (some of whom say the entire pandemic is a hoax), I called for President Trump to appoint Michael Savage to an advisory position to help the president manage the outbreak. In response to this, Savage told an InfoWars producer he wasn’t interested, as he had more than enough to keep him occupied on the subject (which is understandable). Besides, who wants to waste your life in Washington D.C., surrounded by bureaucrats who don’t know anything about infectious disease?
The astonishing lack of knowledge now widely demonstrated by many conservative publishers — a condition I have mockingly called “Stupid-19” — encompasses things like conservative, indy media hosts claiming the regular flu has a 10% case fatality rate, which would mean nearly 10,000 Americans are dying from the seasonal flu each day in America. (The real number, averaged across the year, is about 94 per day.)
Yet this idea has persisted across the pro-Trump media after The Gateway Pundit mistakenly used the wrong numbers from the CDC and claimed the seasonal flu killed 10% of those it infected, while insisting the coronavirus killed only one-tenth as many. This idea was later picked up by Dr. David Brownstein, who repeated the faulty numbers, and from there it flowed to David Knight at InfoWars who clumsily tried to attack me, claiming I didn’t understand math because, he said, the regular flu killed 10%. (Fact check: The regular flu kills less than 1 in 1,000 of those who are infected. See the daily deaths chart comparison in this article, or below.)
Notice how much larger the covid-19 deaths are compared to seasonal flu deaths in the infographic below? Many conservatives look at this and think the light purple box at the right side of the chart is larger than the tall red tower on the left side:
The Rest…HERE
