Saving lives, not trolling the right

Re “Blaming Facebook for new cases of COVID,” Opinion, July 20

It is beneath columnist Jonah Goldberg’s journalistic integrity to label President Biden’s efforts to hold facilitators of blatant vaccination lies to account as “scapegoating.”

Social media is infested with garbage information about vaccines, presenting a clear and present danger to public health.

Likewise, Goldberg’s spurious suggestion that Biden is “fueling the notion” that to-vax-or-not-to-vax is a political question is way off base. We all know who first made this pandemic a political issue by announcing very early on that his administration had this “very well under control” and the virus “like a miracle will disappear.”

Taking cheap shots at Biden for doing his best to set the record straight and get us out of this crisis is uncalled for.

Barbara Jackson

Cerritos

Goldberg does a brilliant job of describing our political moment and yet avoids the key point — that Democrats and Republicans (contrary to his claim) do not agree that fighting the pandemic is the government’s business.

In fact, from the very start, former President Trump made the crisis political by mocking mask wearing and, incredibly, asking for less testing, not more.

The piece concludes with the assertion that Biden is trolling Republicans in a blame game. The sad truth is that Biden’s claim that misinformation about the pandemic is killing people (especially on social media and, I’m afraid, especially from conservatives) is a statement of fact.

The larger truth is even less palatable: We can no longer afford to worry whether some true statement plays into this or that concern of the right. Pandering to the Republican base has already cost far too many lives.

Robert Hanson Burbank