COVID Truthers’ Deranged Love Affair With Tanzania

Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily BeastEven as the world struggles to grapple with the brutal third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, a small but vocal group of skeptics insists that sinister forces are exaggerating the effects of the virus, control measures like lockdowns are unnecessary, and newly developed vaccines are unsafe. These COVID-19 truthers have, for a year now, cherry-picked and distorted all kinds of so-called evidence to prop up their convictions.But over the last few weeks especially, many have tried to argue their case by pointing to the East African nation of Tanzania. There, a remarkably Trumpian president with an interest in downplaying the pandemic and tight authoritarian controls on the press and social media alike has carefully crafted a bogus narrative that the nation is a sort of restriction- and virus-free utopia.“The Tanzanian government is literally the only country in the world who: stopped testing, is against the poisonous vaccine, promotes people to eat healthy, has fully open borders for travel, doesn’t wear masks,” Covid Red Pills, a prominent pandemic denial and misinformation channel on Telegram, claimed in a widely-read post late last week.Read more at The Daily Beast.
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