Sean Hannity's Death Toll

When the coronavirus pandemic started Donald Trump and most of his lackeys at Fox News lied about its severity and said it would go away "like magic." The worst offender at Fox was Sean Hannity. However, Tucker Carlson, another Fox host, realized the serious nature of the coronavirus and warned viewers.

This provided researchers an opportunity to study how news coverage affects transmission of diseases:

The results are stark: greater exposure to Sean Hannity versus Tucker Carlson shows a measurable increase in the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths throughout March and early April. . . .

Carlson began regularly covering the virus in January. During February, he did so with a growing sense of alarm that the United States could experience a heavy death toll—the same month that saw much inaction on the part of the federal government.

By contrast, Hannity gave the virus almost no attention in February. And when he began to discuss the virus at the same frequency as Carlson during the first two weeks of March, it was to minimize the threat compared to the number of annual deaths attributable to car crashes, shootings, or seasonal influenza. Additionally, Hannity also accused the Democratic Party of exaggerating the threat as a way of attacking the president. However, by mid-March, Hannity changed his tune once President Trump declared COVID-19 a national emergency.

The result?

[C]ontrolling for a rich set of county-level demographics (including the local market share of Fox News), greater local viewership of Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight is associated with a greater number of COVID-19 cases starting in early March and a greater number of deaths resulting from COVID-19 starting in mid-March. In a set of permutation tests across socio-economic, demographic, political, and health-related covariates, as well as across geographical fixed effects to account for unobservable factors, we show that the established relationship is highly robust. Indeed, the estimated effects of exposure become stronger as we control for more factors.

Watching Sean Hannity got people killed. And it's not just abstract statistics. There are actual people we can put names to who died from Covid-19 because Hannity lied about the severity of the disease, like Joe Joyce, a bar owner in Brooklyn.

On March 1, Joe Joyce and his wife, Jane, set sail for Spain on a cruise, flying first to Florida. His adult children — Kevin, Eddie and Kristen Mider — suggested that the impending doom of the coronavirus made this a bad idea. Joe Joyce was 74, a nonsmoker, healthy; four years after he opened his bar he stopped drinking completely. He didn’t see the problem.

“He watched Fox, and believed it was under control,’’ Kristen told me.

Early in March Sean Hannity went on air proclaiming that he didn’t like the way that the American people were getting scared “unnecessarily.’’ He saw it all, he said, “as like, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.”

Joe Joyce listened to Hannity and then he died:

[His] children were checking in from New York and New Jersey, and on March 27, when Kristen got off the phone with her father, she called an ambulance. He was wheezing. His oxygen level turned out to be a dangerously low 70 percent. On April 9, he died of Covid-19.

It's like Trump and the hydroxychloroquine debacle: he started hawking it like a snake-oil salesman at his briefings before there was any real data about its efficacy. He pushed it hard, stupidly, constantly, and some poor fool and his wife took some and he died. When Anthony Fauci was asked a question about the drug at Trump's daily campaign rally/clown show coronavirus briefing Trump wouldn't let Fauci answer because Trump doesn't want the truth or facts to get in the way of his preening, lies and bluster.

Trump even fired Rick Bright, the guy running the coronavirus vaccine program, because Bright wanted to actually do controlled tests of hydroxychloroquine before handing it out like candy.

Now it turns out that Trump was totally, utterly wrong about hydroxychloroquine according to a study of Veterans Administration data:

In the study of 368 patients, 97 patients who took hydroxychloroquine had a 27.8% death rate. The 158 patients who did not take the drug had an 11.4% death rate. 

"An association of increased overall mortality was identified in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone. These findings highlight the importance of awaiting the results of ongoing prospective, randomized, controlled studies before widespread adoption of these drugs," wrote the authors, who work at the Columbia VA Health Care System in South Carolina, the University of South Carolina and the University of Virginia.

Now Trump and his people aren't saying anything about hydroxychloroquine. They're banking on his voters being too stupid to notice how consistently wrong he is about almost everything.

"What have you got to lose?" Trump famously asked.

If you listen to Trump, your life.