The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles claims that the coronavirus pandemic “effectively is over.”
On Wednesday’s episode of his podcast, “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles insisted that his viewers could infer that the coronavirus pandemic in the United States “effectively is over” by observing the shift in political messaging coming from the nation’s leaders. In recent days, the nation’s top political leaders have indicated they would explore ways of getting some people back to work.
“What tells us that the coronavirus effectively is over is the political response, because the coronavirus has been primarily a political phenomenon,” Knowles said.
Knowles said that successful politicians are defined by their ability to sense changes in public sentiment and adapt to those changes quickly. California Gov. Gavin Newsom and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Knowles said, are “successful politicians” for this reason.
“You’ve seen all the really talented [politicians] shift their tone over the past few days. Now, this is about reopening. Very good news,” Knowles said. “Now, for guys like maybe Newsom, maybe some of the alarmists—[Los Angeles Mayor] Eric Garcetti, certainly—some of these local politicians, let’s not let them forget that they were dead wrong in the first place. But, we can celebrate at least that the tide has turned.”
Knowles said he didn’t think politicians should be shamed for overestimating the severity of the coronavirus outbreak but that he wanted “it to be clear to all of us to know what this epidemic really was.” He warned that a “barrage of misinformation” was on the horizon, in which people would attempt to inflate the number of deaths caused by coronavirus by “changing the criteria by which they record deaths.”
“They’re going to add thousands of people to the death rolls, even if they were never diagnosed with coronavirus,” Knowles said. “They’re going to do a lot to cover their political rear-ends.”
The claim is an oft-repeated one in right-wing circles. Due to a shortage of testing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has instructed coronavirus deaths to be reported when patients have tested positive or, in the absence of testing, “if the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty.” Public health experts still believe that official counts underestimate the number of people dying from the coronavirus, especially as the number of people dying at home has increased.
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