Vaxxy Joe Biden is claiming that Facebook is committing murder by not censoring enough.
Meanwhile, the Jewish media is claiming that the right-wing media is committing murder by not bullying people into getting vaxxed.
There’s no country that’s more like the United States than Canada, its neighbor to the north. But as the hyper-contagious Delta variant spreads — and as COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations start to rise among unvaccinated Americans in state after state — a key difference between the two countries has emerged.
With nearly 70 percent of its population now at least partially vaccinated, Canada is well on its way to reaching herd immunity. The U.S. — which has stalled out around 56 percent — is not.
Experts say that the proliferation of right-wing media — including OAN, Newsmax and Fox News, whose U.S. opinion hosts have spent months insisting that COVID-19 vaccines “could be dangerous; that people are justified in refusing them; and that public authorities have overstepped in their attempts to deliver them” — may be one of the biggest reasons why.
“In the U.S., news sources have become politicized in a way that has just not happened in Canada,” says Aengus Bridgman, a political scientist at McGill University in Montreal, and the lead author of a recent study on the impact of U.S. pandemic misinformation on Canadian social media users. “Here, right- and left-leaning people both trust our large, important media organizations, and polarized media have been completely unsuccessful in comparison to their U.S. counterparts.
“Having that core anchor is really important during a pandemic,” Bridgman adds, “because what we find is that people who consume traditional media direct from source in the Canadian context have far fewer misperceptions, are less likely to break social distancing norms and are more likely to want to get vaccinated.”
We’re entering into an even more hardcore censorship regime now, where they are going to deploy much more aggressive means of silencing dissent.
What we have allowed is a situation where “fighting the virus” can be used to justify literally anything.
There is no single right or freedom that the government cannot strip from us now under the guise of fighting the virus.