To Fox News Viewers, The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Now One Big Joke

Watching Sean Hannity won’t just make you stupid, it might actually get you killed.

by Ben Cohen

The seemingly never ending winter is over, there is a new administration in power, and vaccine distribution is ramping up at breakneck speed. Our battle with the Coronavirus is beginning to pay dividends, and there is real light at the end of the tunnel. That being said almost 1,000 people a day are still dying from COVID-19 — an astonishing number that should command pretty much all of our attention.

Liberal America is still paying attention to this. In my neighborhood in Takoma Park, Maryland, the infection rate is low, but almost everyone still wears a mask outside. Families are still isolating, relatives haven’t been seen in many months, and daily life is nowhere near back to normal. Everyone we know follows the CDC’s advice, checks the latest news on the pandemic status from reputable news sources, and gets their medical advice from actual doctors.

This is decidedly not the case in Fox News’s America. According to recently polling, a third of all Republicans are not willing to take the vaccine, and almost 50% of Republican men. There are a number of reasons for this — from Donald Trump’s early politicization of the pandemic to rabid online anti vaccine disinformation in right wing circles and vaccine skepticism from people like Tucker Carlson, Republicans are completely immersed in a fact free echo chamber.

More than that, many Republicans don’t really appear to be aware that the pandemic is still happening, or care.

Observing right wing madness

As an experiment, I checked through Sean Hannity’s Twitter feed to find articles he had promoted about the Coronavirus from his website SeanHannity.com. I then sifted through the responses from his followers to see what the general consensus was about the article and the pandemic. After 10 minutes of scrolling it became clear that most of the people responding were not only skeptical about the pandemic, but completely disinterested in it. Instead, they were more interested in a completely unrelated topic that has almost no impact on their lives.

This was the original tweet was about an article on the CDC’s recent warning about a new Coronavirus surge:…

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