| | | Viral Denial: More Parallels with Climate Change…
March 17, 2020
 It will never change. There will always be an audience that wants to be lied to, and someone willing to lie to them.
TPM Muckraker:
The same people who brought you climate change as a hoax think the same about the novel coronavirus.
A think tank influential in the world of climate science denialism pivoted in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic from its normal slathering of posts contesting the science of global warming towards something more current: contending that COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, is no worse than the seasonal flu.
The group also is saying that the U.S. health-care system could cope with anything the coronavirus would throw at it.
The American Council on Science and Health has produced article after article pointing out that winter is a deadlier season than summer (“this may seem counterintuitive, given how much the media hypes summer heat waves”) and calling former Vice President Al Gore “demented.”
It’s been going on for a while. Back in 2005, the group published an article criticizing the “consensus science” of global warming, while in the late nineties the think-tank deemedworries about climate change “disputed hypothetical events.”
The group has had a variety of funding sources from over the years, including more than $900,000 from the right-wing John M. Olin Foundation and around $600,000 from the F.M. Kirby Foundation.
But apart from money sourced from the conservative donor network, what’s interesting about the think-tank is how it shifted so quickly to dismissing coronavirus as yet another example of junk science.
In the past six weeks, the non-profit has pivoted towards denying COVID.
The flu is “far deadlier” than coronavirus, reads one story. That echoes the remarks of another noted climate change denier, Rush Limbaugh, who compared the pandemic to the common cold. Another one claimed that the country’s health care system was ideally suited to handle the surge of a pandemic, noting that Ebola never spread widely in the U.S.
What’s extra notable about these writings is that their authors have been interviewedabout coronavirus in major, mainstream news outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo News, New York Magazine, and others.
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