The federal government Friday admitted that COVID-19 is comparable to the flu, a comparison previously considered a “conspiracy theory” which was heavily censored.
“COVID-19 remains an important public health threat, but it is no longer the emergency that it once was, and its health impacts increasingly resemble those of other respiratory viral illnesses, including influenza and RSV,” said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in updated guidance last week.
Although countries like Singapore began treating COVID-19 like the flu earlier on, the United States government worked with social media companies to censor Americans who made such a comparison. In October 2020, for example, Facebook and Twitter censored a post by President Donald Trump.
“Flu season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu,” Trump tweeted. “Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!”
Twitter suppressed the post for being “misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.”
In 2022, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a video instructing taxpayers to report friends and family for COVID-19 “disinformation” such as comparing COVID to the flu.
In an animated short titled “Countering Disinformation 101: Cybersecurity,” the DHS Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) warned Americans that disinformation about vaccines could “lower vaccine acceptance” and lead to more infections and deaths.
“Consider this post from Susan’s feed,” the narrator said. “It’s from her Uncle Steve who claims ‘Everybody knows COVID is no worse than the flu.’ Statements like these often commit the fallacy of mob appeal by appealing to the emotions of a crowd or for an idea to be accepted or rejected. Comparing a pandemic virus to a seasonal virus also commits the fallacy of weak analogy because the two viruses have telling differences.
The video went on to explain that any sources of information other than the CDC are not to be trusted because the CDC receives government funding. At the end of the film, “Susan” was shown reporting her Uncle Steve’s post as “disinformation.”
