I noticed that people are having the same reaction I did to the announcement that Trump and his wife have Covid-19. If he does have it, he brought it on himself by not wearing a mask or social distancing. And since he is a constant liar and manipulator, there is the possibility that he is lying for some kind of political advantage. It will be interesting to see what happens. I am not happy about this, but I long ago stopped caring about people who don't care about other people.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/why-are-americans-so-confused-about-covid-19-blame-trump-n1241707
Oct. 1, 2020, 1:32 PM EDT / Updated Oct. 1, 2020, 4:56 PM EDT
By Corky Siemaszko
The Cornell study, released Thursday, appears to be the first comprehensive look at pandemic misinformation in the media, and the researchers reached their conclusions after using a content aggregator to analyze 38 million Covid-19 articles from English-language news outlets around the world.
They found that Trump drove major misinformation ”spikes” when he talked about using bleach to cure Covid-19 or when he advocated unproven treatments like hydroxychloroquine.
Trump’s false claim about the pandemic being created by the "deep state" to install a “new world order” was also a big driver of misinformation. So was the president’s promotion of conspiracy theories that Covid-19 was a bio-weapon that was “intentionally or accidentally released by a laboratory in Wuhan, China.”
Much of Trump's false Covid-19 information was dispensed at his coronavirus press briefings, which he ditched in April after his advisers warned they were hurting his polling numbers. He called those briefings "very successful" while touting high viewership numbers.
Evanega said the media bears some of the blame for spreading Trump’s false Covid-19 claims.
“Unwittingly or unintentionally, media do play a major role in disseminating misinformation because they amplify the voices of prominent people, even if those sources are incorrect,” Evanega said.
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Olivia Troye, a former White House Coronavirus Task Force adviser-turned-whistleblower, said she wasn't shocked by the findings in the Cornell study.
"It’s exactly what I saw every day," Troye said on MSBNC. "We would meet as a task force, and the president would go out and say something very contradictory to what the experts and doctors were telling him.”
The study was not the first time Trump has been accused of spreading false pandemic information and lying to the American public about the true extent of the coronavirus crisis.
According to a recently released book, Trump was caught on tape telling the reporter Bob Woodward back in February that Covid-19 was “deadly stuff” but then continued to downplay the danger in pronouncements to the public and politicized the use of masks by refusing for months to wear one in public.
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