Mainstream news sources are beginning to admit things that were entirely ignored, except by us fringe wackos, just a few short months ago:

The study examined infections in New York and California last summer and fall and found people who were both vaccinated and had survived a prior bout of COVID-19 had the most protection.

But unvaccinated people with a prior infection were a close second. By fall, when the more contagious delta variant had taken over but boosters weren’t yet widespread, those people had lower diagnoses than vaccinated people who had no past infection.

It falls to us, now, not to forget how they lied to us for over a year — how they scoffed at the idea that such a thing as “natural immunity” existed.  They have not treated us as adults able to handle a complicated, somewhat ambiguous reality, instead treating us like children who had to be told stories to corral us toward the outcomes they thought preferable.  Those outcomes, by the way, included the political as well as the medical.

We cannot let them merely roll on as if their credibility remains intact.

Of course, the problem with not forgetting their deceit is that we’ll have a hard time knowing what to believe at all.  Is this mainstream about-face a deliberate maneuver indicating that the command has gone out to change the narrative?  Have the partisans calculated that the growing dissatisfaction with their rulership is so massive that they cannot possibly get away with the necessary election fraud, so they have to soften the anger by making the pandemic go away and get their approval/disapproval ratios back within the margin of coverable cheating?  Or have establishment figures whose professional good fortune far outpaced their wits finally figured out what the rest of us have long known?

I propose a test.  If the change of narrative is genuinely resulting from the mainstream media’s finally catching up, then they’ll begin looking upon those who got there first with newfound respect.  Wherever the people involved may sit on the intellectual bell curve, those who report the news will want to cultivate relationships with the analysts who figured out COVID first so that they can better report on the pandemic (and other stories) going forward.

If, however, the change is cynical and political, then they’ll continue to ignore less-favored sources who got it right and to promote more-favored sources who got it wrong… and caused massive damage and distrust along the way.  We’ll know politics are involved because the source will have been proven to be more important than the accuracy.

Featured image by the Climate Reality Project on Unsplash.