Conservative commentators took Fox News to task for pushing the wild claim that the concerning new coronavirus variant, omicron, is nothing more than an election ruse by Democrats.
Fox News contributor Sean Duffy said Friday that Democrats would use the new variant to change election rules. The following day, “Fox & Friends” host Pete Hegseth said, “You can count on a variant about every October, every two years.”
CNN political commentator S.E. Cupp said peddling the conspiracy theory was “evil.”
“That’s evil. That is evil,” Cupp said Monday on “New Day” in response to the claims.
“To get up and tell your viewers, ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s probably just made up and so don’t believe any of the other science. Don’t believe about vaccines or boosters or anything else because it’s probably just Democrats,’” she said. “I don’t know another word for that.”
Check out Cupp’s comments here:
The Washington Post writer Max Boot, meanwhile, slammed the widely watched conservative network as “‘covidiocy’ central.”
Boot used his column in the Post to rip Fox News for pumping out “nonstop disinformation against vaccines even while enforcing a strict vaccine mandate of its own.”
“The rush to dismiss omicron as a hoax is demented and depressing on multiple levels,” he wrote. “It suggests that Republicans have learned nothing from their unwillingness to take COVID-19 seriously in 2020 because they thought it would hurt President Donald Trump’s reelection chances.”
“But while Democrats benefited politically from Trump’s calamitous mishandling of the pandemic, its persistence, with its attendant supply chain woes and surging inflation, is now hurting President Biden,” Boot added. “Thus, it is malevolent idiocy to suggest that Democrats are hyping the omicron variant for nefarious ends.”