With the emergence of the new omicron COVID-19 variant, Fox News has dug in on its two-faced approach to the pandemic this year: At once attacking the Biden administration as being ineffective in responding to the pandemic, while the network itself is sabotaging the public response and spreading misinformation about the effective vaccines. On top of that, appearances on Tuesday by some serious public health experts really just helped to demonstrate the shell game that the network is playing.
Fox News might bring on real experts in order to look like a legitimate news outlet. But the network’s anti-vaccine scare campaigns and calls for resistance will always carry more force — not to mention the appeal among its viewers and their own reactions — making it so that the appearances by any serious people will cause barely a ripple.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, President Joe Biden said that the new variant was “a cause for concern, not a cause for panic,” and that the public response would be done “not with shutdowns or lockdowns but with more widespread vaccinations, boosters, testing, and more.”
In the telling of Fox News personalities, however, Biden was seeking to scare the public — and that both he and the medical experts represent an actual threat to humanity, as when Fox Nation host Lara Logan compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to the Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele during Monday’s edition of Fox News Primetime.
That same night, Fox top prime-time host Tucker Carlson compared Fauci to the Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. He also called out Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, for his recent comment that he would like to see the spreaders of online misinformation “brought to justice.” Carlson ominously warned: “You've got to wonder how long the population is going to put up with this — unelected lunatics haranguing the rest of us as they fail at their core job.”