Topic: CNSNews.com
Intern John Jakubisin wrote in a July 17 CNSNews.com article:
On his nationally-syndicated radio show on Thursday, conservative host Mark Levin contrasted the coronavirus pandemic with the Obama-Biden administration's response to the 2009 swine flu epidemic, especially its decision to stop testing.
Levin replayed a C-SPAN clip from May 2019 in which Ron Klain, a former chief of staff for Biden, says that the Obama-Biden response team “did every possible thing wrong.”
We had a bunch of really talented, really good people working on it and we did every possible thing wrong and 60 million Americans got H1N1 in that period of time.”
"Well, why didn’t they prevent it?" Levin asked. "Why didn’t they have everybody hunker down?”
Because CNS is not terribly into fact-checking -- and, thus, wouldn't be bothering to teach its interns how to do it, especially not to a guy who gets so much uncritical coverage from CNS it may as well be contractually obligated to do so -- Jakubisin didn't tell his readers the full truth. According to actual fact-checkers, testing for swine flu was never completely stopped and continued for monitoring purposes, but indiviual testing stopped because it was no longer needed and provided no useful information; if a patient presented with flu-like symptoms, it was probably the flu.
The swine flu was also much less deadly than coronavirus is; of those 60 million cases, only 12,000 people died. By contrast, of 4.5 million coronavirus cases in the U.S., more than 150,000 have died. Levin's attempt to compare the swine flu to coronavirus is utterly bogus.
Speaking of utterly bogus, Levin totally botched things a few days earlier in another attempt to own Obama that fell utterly flat -- and which CNS has been completly silent about. Levin tweeted out a photoof a bottle of medicine that he called "Obama's hydroxychloroquine from 2008." The provenance of the photo is unclear -- there's no date on it, and one has to wonder how Levin got a hold of it, given how there are laws governing the privacy of medical records.
Except it wasn't what Levin said it was -- it was atovaquone, a medicine like hydroxychloroquine that is used to treat and prevent malaria. The bottle seems to date from July 2008, when, as one observer noted, Obama was visiting Afghanistan, which has a high rate of malaria. That also dates it a good decade before the existence of COVID-19, meaning he could not have possibly been taking it to treat the virus since 1) it didn't exist and 2) nobody has advocated the use of atovaquone to treat COVID-19.
Despite the tweet being completely destroyed, Levin has yet to delete it in shame -- and CNS has yet to tell its readers just how badly Levin screwed up.
