The Pandemic's Wrongest Man - 2021-04-01

The Pandemic's Wrongest Man April 1, 2021, Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

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In this crowded field of wrongness, one voice stands out. The voice of Alex Berenson: the former New York Times reporter, Yale-educated novelist, avid tweeter, online essayist, and all-around pandemic gadfly. Berenson has been serving up COVID-19 hot takes for the past year, blithely predicting that the United States would not reach 500,000 deaths (we've surpassed 550,000) and arguing that cloth and surgical masks can't protect against the coronavirus (yes, they can).

Berenson has a big megaphone. He has more than 200,000 followers on Twitter and millions of viewers for his frequent appearances on Fox News' most-watched shows. On Laura Ingraham's show, he downplayed the vaccines, suggesting that Israel's experience proved they were considerably less effective than initially claimed. On Tucker Carlson Tonight, he predicted that the vaccines would cause an uptick in cases of COVID-related illness and death in the U.S.

The vaccines have inspired his most troubling comments. For the past few weeks on Twitter, Berenson has mischaracterized just about every detail regarding the vaccines to make the dubious case that most people would be better off avoiding them. As his conspiratorial nonsense accelerates toward the pandemic's finish line, he has proved himself the Secretariat of being wrong:

Wikipedia cite:

{{cite news | first = Derek | last = Thompson | title = The Pandemic's Wrongest Man | url = https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-wrongest-man/618475/ | work = The Atlantic | date = April 1, 2021 | accessdate = September 11, 2021 }}