Did media lie the world into an Omicron wave?

The news media, it must be said, do not have the strongest sense of scientific literacy.

On many occasions, experts in countless fields have vented their frustration on the mainstream news media for misinterpreting their research. After the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, this practice has reached new lows, with all manner of false narratives amplified by even the most storied institutions: wild speculation about a Chinese "cover-up", selective reporting on vaccine efficacy despite reams of real world data, and the initial rejection then wholehearted embrace of a "lab leak" origin hypothesis, to name only a few.

Yet despite this wholly justified mistrust, many continue to look to the mainstream media as a reliable source of information-even the aforementioned experts who, turning to another section of a newspaper, passively accept whatever's written there. Novelist Michael Crichton coined the term "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" to describe this phenomenon, but we can just call it what it is: Phony credibility "earned" by being the richest, oldest kids on the block.

This might not be as big a deal for some topics; I doubt anyone suffers too badly if someone on the entertainment beat, for instance, gets the facts wrong. Maybe a producer makes an angry phone call. But it's an entirely different story when it comes to matters of life and death.

To that end, a study given preliminary release early this month may have quietly upended everything we've been told about the Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus, the cause of most of the new infections across the world.

After careful analysis of the figures from the Omicron wave at the start of this year, experts from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital have come to some troubling conclusions: "Our findings suggest… the Omicron variant was as deadly as the previous SARS-CoV-2 waves. The hospitalization risk had a less consistent pattern, but after accounting for confounders, Omicron seems to have a slightly higher hospitalization risk."

If this is accurate, then the media outlets that pushed "living with the virus" as a viable strategy led millions of people straight off a cliff.

Think back to January. The New York Times ran a high-profile column with the bold headline "Omicron Is Milder". The Wall Street Journal said "Omicron May End Up Saving Lives" in a similar vein. What followed was the biggest infection wave of the pandemic, where new records were set for daily infections, hospitalization, even deaths. Though it is a preliminary report awaiting peer review, it should come as no surprise the study has been ignored by those same media; giving it any attention would be tantamount to admitting guilt.

How many lives were lost because of this global swindle? How many people were hoodwinked into believing Omicron was the perfect pandemic offramp and thus threw caution to the winds? And how many chastised China for pursuing an aggressive containment strategy against a virus variant dismissed as "mild" in every "respectable" media outlet, only to pretend to not notice as more people than ever fell ill?

A functioning society would not stand for this. There would be demands for justice, accountability and a sane pandemic policy based on science rather than the whims of corporations that want the economy revved back up at warp speed. Instead, the same outlets that spent those crucial months convincing the world Omicron was nothing to fear have turned to their old standby: Deflect, deflect, deflect.

Just as they did in the early months of the pandemic, they point the finger at one of the few places that has refused to submit to "let'er rip" orthodoxy. In early 2020 Wuhan was the story; the proof China's measures were a "draconian" overreach. But as the virus swept the rest of the world and ICUs filled to bursting in countries that were supposedly "better at fighting outbreaks", as one poorly aged headline put it, it became all too clear that narrative would no longer fly.

As so many countries faltered, unwilling to take the bitter pill and put people over profits, there grew an urgent need to pass the buck. But by that time the worst of the outbreak in China had been contained, and life in Wuhan had largely gotten back to normal. Anyone could see those supposedly "authoritarian" measures had worked. Chastened, the media shifted tack, and thus began the running of other, aforementioned narratives.

Nearly two years later, as the outbreak in Shanghai spiraled out of control, the talking points from Wuhan again came into play. In the last month and a half we've gotten the media's "Greatest Hits" album as they slipped back into their old habits with gusto, willfully ignoring the fact that dozens of other Chinese cities handled their Omicron outbreaks with little incident.

Whatever issues there were with Shanghai's outbreak response-and there were plenty-the country as a whole has proven time and time again it can do what it takes to protect its people.

All this to say the sheer weight of the mainstream media's deception does not depend on the results of a single study. If borne out, these findings only provide scientific proof for what was already abundantly clear: Ignorance of what this virus can do does nothing to prevent the consequences, and underestimation of its potential has never been anything but a grave error. As if to drive this home, the US crossed the grim threshold of 1 million deaths on May 13 according to public data, although the real count could be far higher.

Rather than rage against a country trying to prevent that outcome for its own people, victimized populations should be demanding to know why those in charge have treated them as chattel for the sake of plutocrats' stock portfolios-and why a supposedly "free press" has aided and abetted it.

The author is a writer with China Daily.