As hospitalizations from COVID-19 in red states continue to skyrocket and the Biden administration urges Americans to get vaccinated as a way to prevent another wave of the deadly disease — this time as a result of the new Delta variant — right-wing media continues its assault on science and rational thought.
For weeks now, Fox News host Tucker Carlson has been questioning the need for COVID vaccines, and now Rob Schmitt of Newmax has decided to join the misinformation brigade by proudly asserting that vaccines go “against nature” because diseases are supposed to “wipe out” a certain number of people.
Monday, Schmitt had this to say on the matter of disease and vaccines, according to Media Matters:
“I’m not an anti-vaxxer. I’m not a pro-vaxxer. I’m somebody that’s looking at this thing and trying to figure it out.”
Admitting that he’s “not a doctor,” Schmitt then added:
“I’ve always thought about vaccines, and I always think about just nature, and the way everything works. And I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature.”
And then Schmitt took his remarks to the most absurd level imaginable:
“Like, I mean, if there is some disease out there — maybe there’s just an ebb and flow to life where something’s supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that’s just kind of the way evolution goes. Vaccines kind of stand in the way of that. Do you follow what I’m saying? Does that make sense to somebody in medicine?”
However, if that was the case, children in this country would be dying by the hundreds of thousands each year from preventable diseases such as smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough. Millions more would be paralyzed or die from polio. Is that what we want to see happen when we have ways of eliminating such childhood scourges?
In the case of coronavirus, misinformation is literally death. And while most of us believe everyone has a First Amendment right to express their opinion on any subject, that doesn’t mean it’s wise for so-called “news” networks to delude their viewers into being so cavalier with their health or the health of their loved ones.
If you can’t shout “fire!” in a crowded theater, then you damn well shouldn’t be minimizing the seriousness of a virus that has already killed over 600,000 Americans. To do so makes you complicit in adding to the death toll. That may not be a crime, but maybe it should be.
