10 Scientific American, June 2022
FORUM
COMMENTARY ON SCIENCE IN
THE NEWS FROM THE EXPERTS
Steven W. Thrasher is a professor at Northwestern University
in the Medill School of Journalism and the Institute for Sexual
and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. He is author of the
forthcoming book The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When
Inequality and Disease Collide.Despite being the wealthiest nation on the planet, the U.S. has
continued to have by far the most COVID infections and deaths
per country: one million dead, with no end in sight. This is an
unfathomable number, yet in contrast to the beginning of the pan-
demic, the news media has often downplayed the one-million
mark. In May 2020 the New York Times ran a sympathetic head-
line reading “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, an Incalculable Loss,”
using its entire front page to print names of some of the deceased.
But when the death toll reached nine times that number, the Times
callously wrote, “900,000 Dead, but Many Americans Move On.”
The Times wasn’t alone; several large mainstream publications,
as well as politicians of both major political parties, have been beat-
ing a drum to get “back to normal” for months. The effect has been
the manufactured consent to normalize mass death and suffer-
ing—to subtly suggest to Americans that they want to move on.
The media has helped to shape public opinion so business can
return to the very circumstances that created this ongoing crisis.
A return to normal would allow companies to reap profits, while
some people work in relative safety from their homes (the target
audience of many news organizations’ advertisers) at the expense
of more vulnerable people who must work or study in person.
This past winter David Leonhardt, the writer of the Times’ s
newsletter “The Morning,” asked Michael Barbaro, the host of the
company’s podcast “The Daily”: “If COVID is starting to look like
a regular respiratory virus, is it rational for us to treat it like some-
thing completely different and to disrupt our lives in all these big
and consequential ways[?]”
About 200,000 children in the U.S. have lost one or both par-
ents because of COVID—roughly one in every 375 children. This
is a big and consequential loss, and those children are probably
not among the many who are ready to “move on.” So is it ratio-
nal? To be calling for the end of lifesaving mitigation efforts and
saying they harm children when so many have been orphaned
here and worldwide?
Is it rational for Democrats, Republicans and much of the news
media to press on toward what writer Tom Scocca calls a policy
of “unlimited” COVID?
Is it rational, when as many people have died of COVID in a
month as died of AIDS in its worst year (near 50,000 in 1995), to
think of the novel coronavirus as a “regular respiratory virus”—and
to think that the big and consequential disruptions to worry about
are mask wearing and ventilation and not death and debilitation?
Is it rational to ignore high community viral loads in Ameri-
can society and to not do more to lower them so that fewer peo-
ple are exposed, become sick, transmit onward and possibly die?
Well, it depends on what it is you are trying to rationalize.
If you’re trying to get people to accept that what the nation has
been doing is okay and that 50,000 deaths in a month should be
normalized, then it’s rational.
If you don’t want people to wonder why in just two years the
U.S. death toll for COVID was about 130 percent of the death toll
of four decades of HIV—while global COVID deaths amount to less
than 20 percent of the world’s AIDS deaths—then it’s rational.
If you want to manufacture consent for looser pandemic mea-
sures in the U.S. rather than more comprehensive ones as commu-
nal viral rates demand, then making these claims is rational.But it’s not ethical to manufacture what I call a viral under-
class, and it’s incorrect to pretend the news media have no role
in creating it or in persuading the public that so many deaths
are inevitable.
It’s a shame that major news outlets are hyping up moving on
and returning to normal and not running more pieces calling for
an increase in government-funded mitigation efforts (more free
high-quality masks and tests, upgraded ventilation in work sites
and schools) to stem the tide of death. American norms (rampant
incarceration, eviction, homelessness, lack of health care, poor
ventilation, and economic inequality) are fairly deadly as is.
Acceding to the “urgency of normal” is “wishful thinking,” epi-
demiologist Gregg Gonsalves wrote in the Nation. Intentionally
or unintentionally, “the urgency of normal”—a phrase cropping
up a lot lately—is evocative of a phrase Martin Luther King, Jr.,
used in his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam” at Riverside Church in
New York City, where he preached about “the fierce urgency of
now”: “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We
are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding
conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too
late. Procrastination is still the thief of time.”
If he were still alive, do you think King would have fought for
the fierce urgency of the very normal that produced all this death?JOIN THE CONVERSATION ONLINE
Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]One Million Dead
from COVID
Is Not Normal
News media and policy makers are
normalizing a staggering death toll
By Steven W. Thrasher
Is it rational to ignore high
community viral loads and
to not do more to lower them so
that fewer people are exposed,
become sick, trans mit onward
and possibly die?