How Desperate Are The Media And 'Experts' To Get People Back In Masks? COVID Panic Is Back
The media is pumped to scare people about COVID again
It is now officially, summer 2025. It's been well over five years since the start of the COVID panic, when the united forces of incompetence at the CDC, National Institutes of Health, the media and their partner politicians abandoned decades of evidence on masking and other pandemic policies.
And yet here we are, with the same people who demanded masks and mask mandates and an endless series of rolling lockdowns, none of which worked, back at it again.
Whether it's trying to force children back into masks, promoting debunked information, relying on discredited experts, or pushing panic, there seems to be no limit to what the media is willing to do with COVID.
READ: Yes, COVID Extremists Are Still Trying To Force Kids To Wear Masks
The latest attempt? "Razor-blade throat." Seriously.

CULPEPER, VIRGINIA - FEBRUARY 10: U.S. President Joe Biden puts on his mask after speaking during an event at Germanna Community College February 10, 2022 in Culpeper. Virginia. During his remarks, Biden highlighted the work his administration has done on lowering health care costs and prescription drug prices. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Media Outlets Pushing More COVID Variant Panic
ABC News on Friday posted a remarkable story about the latest COVID variant, NB.1.8.1. What is this terrifying variant causing, according to them? A "severe sore throat." Seriously.
Ready to shut yourself off inside your home, put the whole family back into masks, and get some more booster doses? All to prevent a sore throat, a normal consequence of mild illnesses? No?
Well, ABC and their preferred experts have thought of that. The only way to really get their message across, as they've learned over the years, is rebranding. Suddenly, a sore throat isn't just a sore throat, it's "razor blade throat." And the "experts" they quote in the article make it much, much worse.
The variant is being tracked by the World Health Organization, they say. It's more transmissible than previous variants because it contains changes to the spike protein, and attaches more easily to the ACE2 receptors, proteins found on the surface of cells. All sounds so scary, doesn't it?
Except, just a few sentences later, "NB.1.8.1 doesn't yet appear to be causing increases in cases or in hospitalizations with rates remaining 'stable' so far," according to UC San Francisco professor of medicine and infectious disease specialist Dr. Peter Chin-Hong explained. And that's why they needed to use "razor blade throat." Gotta get those clicks and panic somehow.
And for the "experts," gotta keep their importance up and keep pushing for more personal interventions that don't work. For example, Dr. Alok Patel, a pediatrician at Stanford Children's Health, said that nicknaming the variant "Nimbus," is valuable because catchy terminology can keep the public scared.
"But I think it's important also because it keeps people paying attention to new COVID variants that can be different in terms of infectivity and in terms of spread," he said.
Yet with all the panic over "razor blade throat," even ABC was forced to admit that "there is currently no evidence that NB.1.8.1. "causes more severe disease or is more likely to cause hospitalization."
And here's the best part. Even after undercutting their fearmongering headline by admitting that this new variant doesn't cause more hospitalizations, severe disease, or has even led to an uptick in cases, they still rushed back to the "experts" to demand more masking, endless boosters, and staying home. Seriously.
"The experts recommend that high-risk Americans receive a vaccine twice a year," the article says. Remember when the two-dose vaccination in 2020-2021 made you "fully vaccinated" and Pfizer told us had 100% efficacy? Now it's two doses per year, for the rest of your life. Even though those doses are targeted to variants that have already disappeared.
And the pièce de résistance, of course, was rushing back to discredited Vanderbilt University professor William Schaffner.
Schaffner told ABC that "COVID-19 also tends to spike in the late summer and early fall, so people should consider opening windows to increase ventilation, wearing a mask in certain situations and avoiding crowded areas."
It's endless. It's simply endless. Schaffner has been repeating the same nonsense since 2020, been repeatedly and conclusively proven wrong in every possible way, and he still won't stop. "Wearing a mask in certain situations and avoiding crowded areas" didn't work in 2020, didn't work in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, or for the first six months of 2025. Because masks don't work. The virus is highly transmissible, airborne and endemic, making it impossible to avoid.
Schaffner, displaying a devastating lack of awareness, ability for risk assessment, or common sense, added that it's "Time to stream a movie, as I like to say, rather than going to the movies."
There's no helping these people. They're broken, forever. And they continue to maintain positions of authority where they can spread inaccurate, disproven nonsense to a wide audience through a willing media. ABC and the like continue to default to using Schaffner because he shares their political beliefs, not because he provided useful advice during the pandemic, or accurately assessed how to handle the virus. He did the opposite. Yet they run back to him anyway to tell everyone to wear masks. It's a sickness, it's dangerous, and given the overwhelming evidence showing masks don't work, it's disinformation.
These medical "experts" are going to keep millions of people unnecessarily shut inside their homes, push susceptible parents to force their children into masks or away from normal summer activities. And they're providing more ammunition for those who cling to ridiculous "long COVID" claims.
"Getting infected with COVID and other infectious diseases is not necessarily life or death, but it can still be very debilitating." Patel told ABC. "It can cause people to miss work, to spread the virus, to get people who are higher risk sick and there's still an untold amount of people who have long COVID."
He continued, "So, we don't want to look at COVID as just another common cold, because there's still so much we're learning about it, and there's still so many possibilities with this virus continuing to mutate, if we let it."
We can't stop the virus from mutating! It's impossible! It's never going to stop mutating, it's never going to be eradicated, we have no control over it. It's infuriating, watching the "experts" launder blatant lies through their media partners because it's easier than just admitting they were wrong.
This is why the public has stopped trusting them, the media and their discredited experts. Because their monstrous egos, hubris and remarkable arrogance have pushed them into years of obviously misleading information and panic. It's summer 2025, and they're nowhere close to stopping. In fact, they might just be getting warmed up.