In a March 26 post, the Media Research Center’s Corinne Weaver attacked Twitter for “censor[ing]” right-wing opinion site the Federalist for a coronavirus-related article it published that violated Twitter’s rules against promoting potentially harmful misinformation, shutting down its account until a tweet promoting the article was deleted.
Weaver first played whataboutism: “That’s not how Twitter treated state-sponsored disinformation from China. The platform also ignored tweets that potentially violated its rules, if they came from liberal outlets.” Then it was on to obscuring the facts about why the Federalist article was so dangerous:
The piece from The Federalist was introduced on Twitter with the caption “time to think outside the box.” It did not disagree with the current method of avoiding the virus but offered a third potential strategy: “controlled voluntary infection” (CVI).
Perednia wrote, “CVI involves allowing people at low risk for severe complications to deliberately contract COVID-19 in a socially and medically responsible way so they become immune to the disease. People who are immune cannot pass on the disease to others.”
Weaver described Perednia as a “dermatologist,” which is deceitful in two ways: the Federalist actually described him as a physician in Portland, Oregon”; while he has worked as a dermatologist, he is not currently licensed to practice in Oregon.
Strangely (or not), Weaver refused to tell her readers exactly why Perednia’s advice is considered dangerous: because coronavirus kills people, it’s impossible to know how it can affect people, and it’s not even known at this point whether catching coronavirus confers immunity, which would make the whole “coronavirus party” thing moot. (One such party did not go well.)
Weaver also failed to tell her readers the reason Perednia advocated his approach: to get the economy going and “save the day for millions of Americans, jobs, and future generations who will bear much of the cost of this disease.”
Weaver clearly does not disagree with this approach. The MRC has previously given tacit support to the idea of letting people die of coronavirus in order to save the economy (and, thus, boosting President Trump’s re-election chances).