The government needs special powers over the media during pandemics

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March 15, 2020- by Steven E. Greer, MD

Amy Acton, MD is Ohio Governor DeWine’s coronavirus spokesperson. She was on Tucker Carlson with him to explain why they made the irresponsible fearmongering statement that 100,000 Ohioans have coronavirus.

But she seemed to be literally drunk. Dr. Acton blamed her bizarre behavior on sleep deprivation. To make a long story short, their rationale for claiming that 100,000 Ohioans have COVID-19 was totally unfounded. They simply took an estimated prevalence of one-percent and extrapolated to the Ohio population. However, they were misapplying those numbers. The one-percent number comes from hot spot areas of infection, not from a sampling of the entire population.

The impact of their statements came swiftly. Ohio shut down all events of 100 or more people. Schools shuttered, and so on. The media dissemination of these irresponsible comments from DeWine’s office was the real weapon that did the damage.

The Republican leaders are scaring people to prevent coronavirus deaths from being used against them during the election, and it might just work. They are inconveniencing the country so much that the masses will demand to have their normal routine back. The Democrats will start to criticize them for overreacting, instead of under reacting, which is not a bad thing during election cycles. The GOP will claim they prevented a pandemic, which is impossible to disprove.

Had President Trump and his party not taken the lead at overreacting, the Democrats would have done it for them. If Trump et al had done very little, the Democrat propaganda machines would have filled the void. No good crisis goes without being exploited by the media and their political backers.

Meanwhile, billions of lost revenue, jobs, and inconveniences will take place. Our nation has been harmed greatly.

This is the big lesson: The government needs to have rare, narrowly-defined, powers to circumvent the First Amendment in cases of pandemics and ban coverage of the crises. Crying “fire” in a theater is not protected speech. Scaring people over pandemics is not protected speech either. I just orally argued this week in the Second Circuit my First Amendment case. I know what I am talking about.

There should be a special bipartisan, screened-before-airing, news operation during a pandemic. The White House would oversee it.

How would one enforce this? Easy: arrest the presidents of the news if they collude to fearmonger. Their staff are spineless sheep and would get in line quickly. The FBI could monitor the situation and gather evidence if the newsrooms were conspiring to fearmonger during morning news meetings, etc.

Obviously, the government cannot be trusted with anything of this nature and any powers granted to them would be abused, ala the FISA courts and spy agency surveillance of Americans. The changes in the law would have to be very specific to cover just pandemics. Fortunately, viral outbreaks are well-defined phenomena and not vague “terrorist threats”

There have been fewer than 100 deaths from coronavirus in the entire country so far. This “pandemic” is a non-event. Only in the elderly Italian populations, with incompetent socialized medicine hospitals, have people been dying at higher rates. Even then, the number is fewer than 2,000 deaths.

Every year, there are many different viral outbreaks that kill thousands of people. In 2022, you can bet your bottom dollar that the Democrats will do this again to try to take back the House that they will surely lose this year. The pattern of all of these fearmongering pandemics has coincided with election cycles. Enough is enough.