Newsmax is emerging as one of the new voices in right-wing media that are competing with Fox News for the viewer base of Trump supporters — and it helps that the network’s CEO openly says that the company makes no guarantee of its hosts’ accuracy.
But one story the company may now want to take a closer look at involves its own White House correspondent, Emerald Robinson, who has been spreading rampant anti-vaccine conspiracy theories on her social media accounts — which also cut against the network’s main messaging that vaccines for COVID-19 should be counted as one of President Donald Trump’s great accomplishments.
Just on Wednesday, Robinson posted a tweet, which was mirrored at her Facebook account, declaring that the public did not need a COVID-19 vaccine — but rather that it was a tool of government control. (Robinson’s tweets are also largely mirrored at her account on the right-wing social media platform Parler.)
Even besides Robinson seriously understating the disease’s mortality rate — it’s about four times higher, even with improving trends — she also disregards other negative impacts of “long COVID” in which symptoms persist for three months or more after infection, such as organ damage in younger patients.
In other tweets, Robinson has called for Vice President Mike Pence to shut down the coronavirus task force, warned that mandatory vaccination would be “part of the move to one-world government” linked to “The Great Reset” conspiracy theory, and joked that for Christmas, people should “donate your Fauci/Gates coronavirus vaccine to a garbage dump of your choice!” She has also spread theories about the vaccines rewriting DNA while repeatedly seeking to implicate Dr. Anthony Fauci and philanthropist Bill Gates in some kind of global conspiracy — even suggesting “the plan” for global public health policy involves “using vaccines to track people.”
And back in July, Robinson said that Trump was making a political mistake by pushing for a vaccine at all — and thus getting out of touch with his real supporters.
Robinson even replied this past Monday to one of Trump’s tweets in which he boasted about the vaccine developments, in order to tell him: “I don’t know anyone who voted for you who is going to take these Fauci/Gates vaccines.”
On air, Newsmax has argued that Trump should have received more credit for vaccines (even as vaccines are developed and approved outside the United States).
“If it were not for President Trump and his determination in pushing Operation Warp Speed on the drug companies, the vaccine would still be months away,” host Grant Stinchfield thundered, in a November 9 monologue attacking Pfizer for not announcing their vaccine’s trial results until a week after the election. “Pfizer owed it to the president to announce this terrific news before the election. He deserved that, at the least. Instead, they apparently sat on the news.”
The network also featured a friendly interview two weeks ago with one of the volunteer participants in the Moderna vaccine trial, who described what the whole experience was like. And this week, anchor John Bachman interviewed a doctor who explained that the vaccines now being announced all looked highly promising. Bachman even stated explicitly that he was “playing devil’s advocate here” by asking skeptical questions about the experts’ advice so the doctor could answer them.
