Earlier today, Scott wrote about a documentary that lionizes Anthony Fauci. That is sickening, but the good news is that most Americans seem to understand that our covid response was a fiasco.
In a survey reported on Friday, Rasmussen asked respondents three questions about the job done by our public health “experts.” The first was, “Has the way the government handled the COVID-19 pandemic caused you to have more trust or less trust in public health officials? Or has it not had much impact on your trust in public health officials?” The second was, “Has the way the news media covered the COVID-19 pandemic caused you to have more trust or less trust in the news media? Or has it not had much impact on your trust in the news media?” And the third was, ” Do you agree or disagree with this statement: The experts in charge of the government’s COVID-19 policy ‘were wrong about almost everything?”
The results are heartwarming:
…50% of Likely U.S. voters say the way the government handled the COVID-19 pandemic caused them to have less trust in public health officials. Thirty percent (30%) say the government’s pandemic response caused them to have more trust in public health officials, while 18% say it did not have much impact.
Similarly, 53% of voters say the way the news media covered the COVID-19 pandemic caused them to have less trust in the news media. Just 23% say the pandemic coverage made them trust the media more, while 22% say the coverage did not have much impact on their trust in the news media.
I would be part of the 22%. My trust in the news media hit rock bottom a long time ago.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last week said the experts in charge of the government’s COVID-19 policy “were wrong about almost everything.”
Fifty-nine percent (59%) of voters agree with that statement, including 36% who Strongly Agree. Thirty-four percent (34%) disagree with the DeSantis quote, including 20% who Strongly Disagree.
That last finding is pretty stunning. Fifty-nine percent have figured out that the “experts” were “wrong about almost everything.” It is a true statement, but a lot of people had to penetrate a thick fog of disinformation to figure it out.
I would add another finding from a poll my organization had done for the Fall 2022 issue of Thinking Minnesota. We asked how much confidence Minnesotans have in a series of institutions, including the public health establishment. We found that only 36% of Minnesotans–hardly known as an anti-establishment cohort–have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in the public health establishment, while a whopping 62% said they have little or no confidence. That is a brutal finding after two years in the public eye.
This is one more instance where the Left thinks it controls the narrative because it controls the press, the universities, the entertainment industry, the public schools, and so on. And in a sense it does control the narrative, if by that we mean what appears in newspapers. But it is striking how many Americans have learned to look past leftist messaging and figure out the truth, much as Russians who were fed a daily diet of lies by Tass and Pravda learned to discern reality.
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