Often, there are reasons to criticize newspapers, reporting on the current state of knowledge is none of them.
Playing down a lethal pandemic in order to get people back to work is most certainly something to criticize them for
Here is a covid timeline of NewYork, make of it what you will
The current state of knowledge, buried deep in the article, was their own statement that nobody knew how prevalent reinfections were.
This is after repeatedly saying it’s rare.
Also, at a very basic level, this was in the beginning of a global pandemic where infecting rates were high, there has already been multiple waves, and and it would be literally impossible to claim that reinfection would be rare. If a new variant took over every 6 months due to waning immunity to a new set of variants, they’d never detect it.
Applying very basic logic to the situation made this article and everyone quoted in it reckless and partly responsible for the deaths of thousands, maybe millions. It was part of a wider campaign of COVID minimization led by a press complicit in that narrative (one that aligned with capitalist interests in real estate and forcing people back to work / ending “lockdowns”) and a minority of irresponsible researchers known as “COVID minimizers” that lied through their teeth for a chance to get in the press.
NYT was one of the worst Covid bullshitters
NYT’s business is manufacturing consent. They manufactured consent to invade Iraq. They manufactured consent for perpetual covid circulation, reinfection, and the death and disability that follow. They’ve been manufacturing consent for supporting an apartheid ethnostate in committing genocide.
Nobody should take it seriously as a news outlet.
