On Friday's MTP Daily, a few minutes before the Rittenhouse verdict took over the news, host Chuck Todd uncorked a nasty editorial about the persistent trend of COVID deaths under Biden. Todd argued that "right-wing media" has blood on their hands, not Team Biden. He laid it on thick in claiming only the red states were full of COVID problems.
TODD: Bottom line, the pandemic has been relentless. And since Biden tried to declare independence from it on July 4th, more than 160,000 Americans have been added to our death toll, despite vaccines being widely available. Obviously, most of those recent deaths, are the unvaccinated. So the folks with blood on their hands there are the misinformers, particularly in right-wing media.
While the media assumed that pretty much every COVID death under Trump could be directly tied to Trump, Todd tapdanced on the line that Biden isn’t responsible at all for the persistent death toll on his watch. Blame Fox News and talk radio!
TODD: More than 770,000 people have died in total – 365,000 since January 20 of this year. And meanwhile the administration this week has suspended its work on enforcing OSHA’s vaccine mandate for private sector workers due to some legal issues, thanks to the Fifth Circuit.
And right now, the White House does not seem anxious to focus more time and energy and political capital to fight the politicalization [sic] of this pandemic. The unfortunate dark reality is they are fighting some powerful forces of defiance and disinformation, which have only worsened the partisan gap and human suffering.
The media has politicized this pandemic from the first wave. It's pathetic to pretend that suddenly Biden has to fight to prevent the politicizing, or that MSNBC hasn't exemplified the "partisan gap" throughout the suffering. Todd then pushed that partisan gap as hard as he possibly could:
TODD: According to data from The New York Times and the CDC, let me show you this. 19 of the 20 counties with the highest COVID death rates per capita right now are all in deep red America. They all went for Trump. If only the former president would convince these folks to get vaccinated. But he did not. This is the same trend as hospitals with the highest hospitalization rate. It’s predominantly in red America as well.
The ten most vaccinated states, on the other hand, are a sea of blue. All went for Biden in 2020, every one of them. And every one of the least vaccinated states went for Trump, with the exception of one, the state of Georgia.
This is a sleazy tactic. A chart of COVID deaths from the start through this week finds that states Biden won are mixed in. When measuring deaths per 100,000 people, New Jersey is third, Arizona is fifth, New York is seventh, Georgia is ninth, and Massachusetts and Rhode Island are 11 and 12.
There were no ads in the MTP hour on Friday, but right before this commentary, there were ads by Cadillac and Liberty Mutual.
