In April, CNSNews.com writer Melanie Arter gave Dr. Marty Makary a platform to downplay the severity of the coronavirus epidemic, touting how there were more tuberculosis cases than COVID cases and repeated his claim that “the U.S. would reach herd immunity by April.” Both claims ended up being wildly wrong — we’re now seeing record COVID cases due to the Delta variant, which demonstrated that the “herd immunity” Makary predicted didn’t happen in April and is certainly not happening now.
Nevertheless, Arter brought Makary back to misinform further on COVID in an Aug. 5 article:
People who are unvaccinated and not immune to COVID-19 have been demonized, “and it’s unfounded,” according to Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health, because “those who are unvaccinated pose no risk to the vaccinated beyond that of a common cold.
Makary said he’s concerned that there may be another year of virtual learning in schools, “because Delta is projected to peak in late August and early September.”
“As schools are starting to open up you’ll see the incline that will be interpreted as the beginning of a larger wave, but this is not a stock price. This is the number of cases. It only captures the cases reported, not home cases, and it doesn’t recognize it’s in a younger population and hospitalizations are disproportionately much lower,” he told Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom” on Thursday.
“I wish we would change the lexicon and stop talking about the vaccinated and unvaccinated and just talk about the immune and non-immune. There’s been this demonization of those who are not immune, not vaccinated, and it’s unfounded. Those who are unvaccinated pose no risk to the vaccinated beyond that of a common cold,” Makary said.
He said the Delta variant spread quicker, “but there’s no evidence that it’s more virulent and dangerous in kids.”
Well, Makary was wrong about that too — the Delta variant is sending more children to the hospital than the original outbreak did. It has also turned out that the COVID vaccines are not as effective against the Delta variant than they were against the original strain, so the unvaccinated do pose a higher risk to the vaccinated than Makary claimed — and, of course, COVID and the common cold are two very different things.
Makary is also missating the issue, which is really about the risk careless unvaccinated people pose to other unvaccinated people, like children. The Delta variant surge is primarily one of the unvaccinated, with the vast majority of the infections occurring with them. People who can be vaccinated but refuse to do so do, in fact, deserve some level of demonization.
Note that Makary made those statements on Fox News. He is very much a Fox favorite to a near-hackish extent. A few days ago, he wrote a commentary for the Fox News website accusing the Biden administration of using COVID to distract from the situation in Afghanistan. In other words, he’s the kind of “expert” Fox News — and, thus, CNS — absolutely loves.