Revisiting one of many debunked efforts to minimize the scale of the coronavirus pandemic

Fox News host Laura Ingraham has been a frequent and energetic perpetrator of misinformation over the course of the coronavirus pandemic. Her repeated advocacy of the drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the virus included her personally appealing to President Trump on its behalf and almost certainly helped solidify the president’s belief that the risky medication might serve as an effective prophylactic treatment. Her efforts to downplay the scale of the pandemic have included ridiculous insinuations of a conspiracy theory to inflate the number of deaths from covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

And then there was this, from earlier this month.

At this point, you can see the “edit” in the description of the linked article, an amendment added after the fact to acknowledge, to as small a degree as possible, that the premise of the article was entirely wrong. That was obvious in the moment, as The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake made clear. Continue reading.