From the Deseret News:
“Dr. Anthony Fauci isn’t quite ready to say you’re safe to celebrate Christmas and the winter holidays without taking proper precautions…”
“Dr. Anthony Fauci has revealed a number of things over the last year — when you can spend time with your family, what’s next in the COVID-19 surge and how to stay safe in the coronavirus pandemic. Now, Fauci has revealed why people don’t like him. Fauci recently told ”Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace that he is a polarizing figure because he supports “science, data and hard facts” rather than conspiracy theories.”
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Effective headlines for a religious media market? Simply good journalistic strategy?
For sure. And maybe something more…
It’s one thing to regard the word of a living prophet as especially trustworthy – even as a revelation of higher wisdom (which is a good thing). It’s quite another to take that prophetic counsel as justification for portraying the current thinking of a single health authority as equally trustworthy – so much so that normal journalistic duties (like asking hard questions, and showing even a pretense of critical examination and scrutiny) are laid aside. Such is the sorry state of virtually all health journalism in America – unfortunately, including at the Deseret News.
You can do better than this, Deseret News! We are grateful for all of the good work you do on a regular basis.
Good post! Remember when Anthony Fauci revealed that there would never be a vaccine mandate? I do! Here it is:
“You don’t want to mandate and try and force anyone to take a vaccine. We’ve never done that,” said Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, during a video talk organized by George Washington University.
“You can mandate for certain groups of people like health workers, but for the general population you can’t” he added, citing the example of the National Institutes of Health, where health workers can’t treat patients without a flu shot.
Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison hours earlier announced that coronavirus vaccines, once approved, would be mandatory for everyone in his country, barring medical exemptions.
But the United States’ decentralized system of government, and anti-vaccine sentiments that have been building for decades, had in any case made a program of mandatory immunization unlikely.
“It would be unenforceable and not appropriate,” said Fauci.
OOPS! Not a great revelation after all.
https://news.yahoo.com/covid-19-vaccine-wont-mandatory-194038185.html
My question would be what DOES good health journalism look like?
In this environment, commentators are getting punished for deviating from the official narrative. Both individual journalists and whole outlets get branded heretics endangering public health as a whole. So, given that – what is a publication to do?
Certainly, I agree with there should be space to ask questions and scrutinize truth claims (something I’ve appreciated about Millenial Star) – but it’s sure easier (in theory) than it is (in practice)…especially in our atmosphere today, right?
Since March of 2020, I have felt that we have all gone through the looking-glass. We’ve been in Wonderland, except that it’s really Horrorland.
Why anyone would take Fauci seriously at this point truly staggers me. But millions hang on his every syllable, his every pronouncement.
Towns, quite right, but this is not just about Fauci the person. I would imagine that whoever was the health talking head for the feds would be getting just as much attention as Fauci gets from the media. The real question is: why does the media, including a better-than-average newspaper like the Des News, promote his pronouncements like he is a Seer of some kind? The Des News promotes Fauci as if he gets to decide how we all spend our holidays. Since when do a free people allow themselves to be controlled by a bureaucrat in this way?
When you put all the headlines side by side like this, he really is a buffoon.
My favorite is when he proclaims himself the embodiment of the One, True, Science.
I don’t think he’s a buffoon, Joyce. He thinks a lot like other doctors I know. I think he represents the dominant view of medicine that focuses very little on long-term trajectories of treatment (shall we say “myopic”?) – and I do think it’s sad that this view is represented as “reality” by most everyone in media with so little critical exploration. I wrote this about the longer-term trajectory recently – https://publicsquaremag.org/health/long-term-short-term/
I see this more as an indictment of Latter-day Saints not only looking to Fauci, but scientists in general as a revelator than something that discredits Fauci (although he certainly doesn’t have much credibility in my view).
I’ve felt uncomfortable by the facemasks, and part of it is I feel the facemask is the modern version of false robes of a medical priesthood. We see doctors wearing masks, and we want to endow ourselves with that power and protection. (well myself and may others don’t “want” to, but you get the idea).
The medical mask is so much more than a mere protection. It’s a reflection of our worship of medical science as a culture. We may not see it that way, but we don’t always understand our culture. Just as Adam put on the apron to mimic another’s false power, we shroud our faces to pattern after another.
There is a reason the shape we’ve adopted for our masks mimics the doctors rather than the bedouin keffiyeh.
He might be part of the hive mindset Jacob, but from here in the cheap seats, he’s a buffoon…
This click bait has the right level of insider mystery and half-truth vibe to make it memetically fit most anywhere. It obviously works a bit better than standard click tropes in Deseret. But, I’d hazard a guess that its resonance is also because of the quasi religious nature of woke vax ardents and their politicized spandrels.
As our Great (religious) Awokening climaxes it’s inevitable that the landscape wells occupied by religion will be rediscovered by religion’s moralized secular equivalents. I think we’re actually watching the emergence of a new moral quasi-religious class/caste in real time. It would seem that human societies still need a priestly class. This is probably for adaptive social cohesion reasons. But, it could also just be legacy trappings from Chiefdom polity eras where moral and war/governance leadership positions were strongly separated. Since the Kingdom polity era these roles & classes have intertwined for periods as they’ve paced and led each other. We’re just witnessing secular systems and personae playing with things that seem clearly religious to some and luridly fitting for others.
There’s a lot of magical, utopian, and shamanistic thinking out there right now. And it’s getting fitter as existential worries deepen.
Chris G: are you using an automated word-salad generator or translator?
Bookslinger, no guarantees that an iphone in the parking lot didn’t add a bit of garble to things. 🙂 But, I suspect it was just me talking like I normally would around family and friends. Sometimes Covid lockdowns just make one want to be themselves for a moment or two… Thanks for putting up with some word salad to allow me that for a moment.