COVID-19 Misinformation: Brought to You by the U.S. Government: Years After the End of COVID, NYC Remains Trapped in ‘Long Lockdown’, and other C-Virus related stories

Chris Kleponis - Pool via CNP/CNP / Polaris/Newscom

COVID-19 Misinformation: Brought to You by the U.S. Government

Remember when the federal government accused social media companies of spreading misinformation about COVID-19? Well, according to a recent bombshell report from Reuters, top U.S. policy makers should have pointed their fingers at a giant mirror.

That's because the U.S. military, under both former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, deliberately spread misinformation on social media about the COVID-19 vaccines, in hopes of encouraging Filipinos to distrust the Chinese government. The disinformation campaign—which involved hundreds of fake accounts on X—promoted the idea that Sinovac, the COVID-19 vaccine created in China, was dangerous.

"COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don't trust China!" read one typical tweet.

Other tweets aimed at Asian Muslims incorrectly asserted that the vaccines contained pork and were contrary to religious dictates. One implied the Chinese vaccine contained rat poison. "What if their vaccines are dangerous?" wondered one Twitter user.

As Reason's Matthew Petti points out, poorly conceived government-backed disinformation campaigns supposedly aimed at foreign adversaries are nothing new. But this one is especially hypocritical since opposition to vaccine misinformation has become one of the Biden administration's central philosophies.

Disinfo Days

In January 2021, Biden was sworn in as president with a mandate to return the country to normalcy amid the death and destruction of the COVID-19 pandemic. By this time, the vaccines had become available to at-risk populations, and over the ensuing weeks and months, millions of Americans chose to become vaccinated.

But the Biden administration became unsatisfied with the pace of vaccination; government health advisers were particularly distraught about vaccine-hesitant Americans receiving bad information about COVID-19 from social media. In July 2021, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released an advisory describing misinformation as an urgent crisis. --->READ MORE HERE

Years after the end of COVID, NYC remains trapped in ‘Long Lockdown’:

Four years to the day since Big Apple restaurants were finally allowed to serve food outdoors again as part of COVID-19 “Phase II” reopening, we are still locked down.

Not physically but emotionally and psychologically.

The miserable three months of government-mandated “sheltering in place” that began on March 20 of 2020 not only shattered the economy that’s yet to fully recover, it indelibly altered our brain chemistry.

The Times Square “Ghost Town” is history.

But it’s the stubborn squatter in our psyches that can’t be evicted.

I’m not the only who feels that way.

A friend who books parties for several famous Manhattan restaurants compared her 2019 business with today’s, which has largely recovered in head counts and dollar volume:

“It’s the same but it isn’t the same.”

She was correct.

If there’s such a thing as Long COVID, there’s Long Lockdown.

I can’t shake memories of paying $10 for a months-old copy of French Vogue — in a language I can’t read — just to have something to stare at over dinner in April 2020, when magazines and newspapers disappeared from shelves.

I avidly tuned in to then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s daily, empathy-oozing televised briefings.

But I soon realized that his tallies of intubations and deaths, more than any actual viral threat, scared companies from encouraging employees to return to offices even after he allowed them to reopen.

Cowed by the teachers union, he and then-Mayor Bill de Blasio kept schools mostly closed for another year.

Indoor dining didn’t come back until October 2020 at unsustainable low capacity and then was shut down again in December for two more months.

Cuomo seemed intent on punishing the city — a fact voters should keep in mind should he decide to take on Mayor Adams in next year’s primary. --->READ MORE HERE

Follow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:

Researchers disclose the effect of social media use on the mental health of college students during the pandemic

Should you get the updated COVID-19 vaccine? See current guidelines from CDC.

USA TODAY: Coronavirus Updates

WSJ: Coronavirus Live Updates

YAHOO NEWS: Coronavirus Live Updates

NEW YORK POST: Coronavirus The Latest

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