The Salt Lake Tribune Shouts "Fire!" in a Crowded Theater
The editorial board of the Salt Lake Tribune owes everyone an apology for their unprofessional, fact-free, and dangerously inflammatory op-ed.
On January 15, 2022 the Salt Lake Tribune editorial board published an op-ed calling on Utah Governor Spencer Cox to show that Utah is a “civilized place” by deploying the National Guard “to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/editorial/2022/01/15/utah-leaders-have/
Breathtaking in its vitriol, the Trib’s op-ed is full of angry accusations and inflammatory phrases, but perhaps especially disturbing is its zeal for forcing a Covid injection into everyone.
Abraham Joshua Herschel, the Jewish scholar who lost family members to Nazi atrocities during WWII, states “Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed.”
Every decent person in Utah and everywhere should be appalled by the two main truths the Trib’s editorial board has revealed:
1) The Salt Lake Tribune editors are full of fear, anger, and hatred toward those who do not agree with them in thought and action with regards to the Covid response.
2) The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board is willing to use its public platform to force medical treatment on others, and to remove people (and information) from society that it deems unclean.
I have harbored, perhaps naively, the hope that most people are horrified by the lockdown on the unvaccinated in Austria. I thought they would be appalled by the use of rubber bullets and tear gas on peaceful protestors, and the forced removal of exposed individuals to Covid camps, in Australia. I believed that most people would recognize the danger in French President Macron’s statement, “I really want to hassle them (the unvaccinated), and we will continue to do this – to the end.” To what end? To the end of telling people they have no control over what they put into their own bodies.
Coercion is force. Discrimination is wrong. Abuse of power is wicked. Government tracking apps and digital medical records never go away.
The Tribune op-ed claims, “We might have headed off omicron with a herd immunity-level of vaccinations, but that would have required a vaccination mandate, which our leaders refused.” The Trib calls the forced injection of a substance into unwilling people, “the kind of vaccine mandate that civilized society has used for generations to effectively wipe out everything from polio to diphtheria to the measles.” That is an exaggerated, uneducated, and historically inaccurate statement.
Twice the Trib uses the word “civilized.” Their op-ed is anything but civilized; it is an irresponsible temper tantrum against thoughts and behaviors that they find offensive.
Naomi Wolf, a longtime liberal and former adviser to the political campaigns of both Bill Clinton and Al Gore, states, “[I]n America, free speech means people are free to say really stupid things or wrong things or things that don’t bear scrutiny, but that’s how we get smarter and… have open debate, and we see where stupid ideas fall apart. [W]e are exposed to different points of view, and people can criticize or question the experts.”
But not anymore. As Wolf explains, “We’ve reached a kind of digital Stalinism” in America, with a “scary marriage” of government, big pharma, and media censorship. Wolf has been studying the descent of democracies into totalitarian states for years, most recently observing and writing about Venezuela.
Wolf states, “I’m Jewish, so I’m allowed to say this. They totally did things like this [censorship and propaganda] in Germany when it was still a fragile democracy…[T]his is very characteristic of a bigger picture of closing democracies or emerging totalitarian societies.”
The Salt Lake Tribune’s one-sided op-ed eerily echoes the types of reasoning used to justify the marginalization and attempted extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany.
The Nuremburg Trials brought Nazi leaders to account for crimes against humanity committed during WWII. Among those crimes perpetuated by the Nazis, was the forced medical experimentation on Jews and others in concentration camps. One of the results of the trials was the formation of the Nuremburg Code, which prohibits forcing medical procedures on an unwilling individual. A violation of the Nuremburg Code is exactly what the Salt Lake Tribune editors just called for.
The Salt Lake Tribune’s article is an example of media propaganda in support of an official narrative. I’m not against questioning the actions of people in elected positions. In fact, it’s essential that we always examine and hold to account those who have been chosen to govern. But the Tribune editors arrogantly armchair quarterback Utah’s pandemic response, while inaccurately laying all the blame for the spread of Covid on the unvaccinated.
The Tribune criticizes Utah’s (mostly Republican) leaders for not leading “the kind of patriotic coming together that Americans responded to after Pearl Harbor and 9/11.” Rubbish. There has been a significant amount of support for, and compliance with, the pandemic response in Utah.
All of us remember the incessant “We are all in this together,” mantra with regards to the lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccines.
It was much easier to vilify the unvaccinated, which Pres. Joe Biden unabashedly did in his September 9, 2021 call for vaccine mandates, before the data showed that the Delta and Omicron variants spread as easily through the vaccinated as the unvaccinated. And of course, absent from the Trib’s editorial, and from much of the public policy and conversation over the past two years has been the reality of natural immunity gained by those who have been infected by SARS, and have recovered. (One of many reasons why some are not eager to take the jab.)
Absent also is the incontrovertible data showing that Covid infection has almost no impact on children and young people, and is a disease of the elderly and infirm. The Tribune laments that those nasty people inconveniently talking about freedom of choice and freedom of speech, have led us “To watch our children lose weeks, months or more of their precious educational opportunities.”
The restrictions on K-12 schools and public universities during the pandemic has been a travesty and a tragedy, to which the Salt Lake Tribune has contributed with its often inflammatory and unresearched coverage of the pandemic.
International studies informed us in the summer of 2020 that children were not at high risk for Covid, nor were they large spreaders of Covid.
https://adc.bmj.com/content/105/7/618
But fear prevailed, and thousands of American children have been permanently blighted because of the selfish demands of teachers’ unions, and the damaging policies of many government and public health officials.
We saw at the beginning of the 2020-2021 academic year that Covid cases on campuses were not leading to hospitalizations, yet college students were forced to stay in their dorm rooms to take online courses, and made to feel guilty for trying to engage in normal human interactions. The toll on the mental and emotional health of our young people far outweighs any risk most of them have if they contract Covid.
Sweden’s public schools remained open throughout the pandemic and did not recommend face masks for children. The result should be catastrophic, by the Tribune’s standards, but not one of the 1.8 million school children in Sweden has died due to Covid. In addition, school teachers there were found to be less at risk for Covid than other professions.
The Tribune calls for the vaccination of everyone, without thought, and without choice. The Tribune claims to be concerned about children, yet fails to note that the vaccines are causing adverse events in children and young people, who were not at risk from Covid itself. But wait, the Tribune would call that fact a lie, or misinformation, because it doesn’t fit their narrative.
https://healthfreedomidaho.org/tragic-adverse-reactions-of-covid-vaccination-in-children/
The editors at the Tribune note that epidemiologists have known for years that coronaviruses (such as the one that causes the common cold) mutate into less potent but more easily transmissible variants. Yet somehow the op-ed blames the inevitable variants on the unvaccinated. The Trib warns that despite the mostly cold-like symptoms of Omicron, “serious cases are still enough to overwhelm hospitals.”
Despite the dramatic rise in positive Omicron cases, ICU hospitalizations are not rising significantly in Utah. Today, January 17, 2022, there are 182 in the ICU with Covid. https://coronavirus.utah.gov/case-counts/
There were 223 in the ICU with Covid on December 9, 2020, the highest number for the year. The highest number in 2021 was 238 on October 11, 2021. Utah hospitals, with over 4,600 staffed hospital beds, including almost 500 ICU beds, have never been overrun by Covid cases.
Cold and flu season is always busy in the hospitals, which need to operate at a high capacity, in order to make a profit. Not only that, but there would be much fewer people in the hospital for Covid if our national public health leaders had pursued early treatments for Covid-19. Instead, they have suppressed treatments and have placed all emphasis on the experimental vaccines, which have failed to prevent illness or spread of the disease.
The editors at the Salt Lake Tribune are having a meltdown. Could it be because the Supreme Court put a stay on the OSHA vaccine mandate, calling it an overreach of authority? Maybe it is because thousands of people oppose the ineffective mask mandates and are not supportive of another power grab by Dr. Angela Dunn and Mayor Jenny Wilson, narrowly approved by the Salt Lake County Council, imposing face masks through February 7. Perhaps it is the happy faces they’re seeing at sporting events, concerts, theaters, and other places where people are again gathering. How dare they be happy and free and engage in normal human interaction? Don’t they know there is a pandemic?
The Trib editors are conveniently ignoring the fact that Omicron is spreading as readily in heavily restricted, masked, and vaccinated California and New York as it is in Utah. They seem oblivious to the fact that Florida, with a comparable, but older, population than California, has fared better than California. This, despite Florida in September 2020 permanently removing mask mandates and restrictions on gatherings and businesses, and opening their public schools and universities to in-person learning.
Again, “Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed.” It is time for every person everywhere to consider very carefully the words they are listening to and supporting.
The Salt Lake Tribune’s illogical and inappropriate anger against the unvaccinated is odious. We are in desperate need of civil discourse, based on data and common sense, not propaganda. Policy making must be based on constitutional principles and real science, not fear.
The editorial board of the Salt Lake Tribune owes everyone an apology for their unprofessional, fact-free, and dangerously inflammatory op-ed.
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Edited 01-19-22