MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan blasted those who claim that the government and society overreacted with their safety measures to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The host of "The Mehdi Hasan Show" also claimed that people who lamented school closures and the fact that children’s education declined during the pandemic are only "pretending to care."
Hasan declared that even more precautions should have been taken to prevent the spread of the virus.
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Hasan made his points on Twitter, where he shared a clip from a recent episode of HBO’s "Real Talk with Bill Maher" in which the comedian spoke about "how bad the collateral damage has been" due to pandemic era safety guidelines.
In the clip, Maher mentioned reports that "the pandemic erased two decades of progress in math and reading" for the nation’s schoolchildren. Though he amended claim, stating, "This pisses me off. I see these headlines all the time. The pandemic didn’t do that, the way we handled the pandemic did that."
Maher’s claims outraged Hasan, who argued that Americans didn’t do enough to combat the pandemic. He tweeted, "Amazing to me how it has become the new conventional wisdom to say we *overreacted* to the pandemic when the exact *opposite* is the case: the U.S. took the pandemic much *less* seriously than we should have done & suffered way more deaths, as a result, than we should have done."
He then accused those lamenting the side effects of these safety measures of pretending to care and using children for political gain.
In a subsequent tweet, he wrote, "And it kills me to hear so many people pretending to claim they care about school closures or ‘learning loss’ from the pandemic, and weaponizing children for political purposes, while ignoring the 200,000+ *orphaned kids* the pandemic created in America *alone*. Sickening tbh."
The Department of Education released a report in September showing math and reading scores declined more during the coronavirus pandemic than they have in decades.
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Medhi’s thread then criticized those who have claimed that Sweden handled COVID-19 better because it didn’t lockdown its citizens. He added, "Oh and please stop going on about how Sweden handled the pandemic better. Can we let that myth die? Please."
He concluded his posts with a blurb from a Nature.com article stating, "’During 2020, however, Sweden had ten times higher COVID-19 death rates compared with neighbouring Norway... We recommend Sweden begins a self-critical process... to avoid future failures, as occurred with the COVID-19 pandemic.’"