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Grant Wahl's Widow, an Epidemiologist, Fights Back in the NYT Against Vicious COVID Lies [1]

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Date: 2023-01-09

The Internet gives malicious lies a chance to erupt and spread like volcanic lava, obliterating truth wherever the incendiary poison flows on social media — a much larger universe than an island that contains actual lava flow. It’s bad enough when abject lies become gospel truth within the right wing bubble. But deadly lies now flow unchecked outside this bubble, leaving in their path violence, illness and mass death.

Lie dissemination was born long before Trump through the toxic funnels of Fox News, the Gingrich Republicans and the likes of Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh, but in 2020 these conduits combined with the pathologically lying President to kill perhaps hundreds of of thousands. When Limbaugh died in 2021, the usual hand-wringers like Frank Bruni asked Must We Dance on Rush Limbaugh’s Grave? My response was “I’m not dancing on his grave. I’m mourning those who died from his lies,” like claiming “staged overrunning of hospitals” and invective like calling us “mask-wearing freaks.”

Two years later, Trump is out of office but his fatal legacy continues to kill, as vicious lies about COVID vaccines now spread faster than the disease itself.

Céline Gounder is an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist and the widow of the journalist Grant Wahl, who tragically died of an aortic aneurysm while covering the World Cup in December.

Grant Wahl

Immediately upon his death, legions of disinformation-mongers began spreading the lie that he died from the COVID vaccine. Dr. Gounder’s response at first was limited to a statement and a few interviews, because speaking out more “risks giving them the attention they crave.”

But when the same bottom feeders pounced on Damar Hamlin’s collapse on the football field last week, Dr. Gounder was compelled to write today’s guest essay for the New York Times: Grant Wahl Was a Loving Husband. I Will Always Protect His Legacy (featured in today’s Abbreviated Pundit Roundup). Despite the certainty of increased vile attacks and death threats, she outlined the facts about her husband’s death and the source of the lies, and dissected the logical fallacies at their heart:

The vaccine disinformation playbook includes the use of fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry-picked data and conspiracy theories. Not a single qualified medical or public health expert has supported the claim that my husband died from Covid vaccination.

And the lava of deadly falsehoods now spreads from killing unvaccinated COVID patients to mass public health crises, like unfounded childhood vaccine skepticism, leading to “the return of polio to the United States and the fact that so many children in Ohio are suffering from measles right now.” She notes these lies caused even the Democratic Congress in December 2022 to repeal the military vaccine mandate, as I wrote then, a triumph of madness, threatening our troops’ health and national security, as former Representative Max Rose wrote.

I am in awe of people like Céline Gounder, the Sandy Hook parents, the Parkland kids and others, who surmount their unimaginable pain to fight against those who exploit their tragedy for political and economic advantage or pure sociopathic cruelty. Though they have succeeded — for Sandy Hook parents, the likely financial ruin of Alex Jones, for the Parkland kids led by David Hogg, mobilization of young voters to turn the midterm elections toward the Democrats — fighting against deadly lies is a daily, continuing battle.

We are especially grateful for people like Céline Gounder, who have an expert background in the very area at issue, for speaking out despite violent attacks from the poisonous but substantial minority for whom the cruelty is the point.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/9/2146255/-Grant-Wahl-s-Widow-an-Epidemiologist-Fights-Back-Against-Vicious-COVID-Lies-in-the-NYT

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