RFK Jr. Owns Dana Bash Proving Media Fed COVID Hysteria

In a stunning revelation, Dana Bash admits that it’s her job to tell the American people the truth. Where has that attitude been the last five years?

On CNN’s “State of the Union” this weekend, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the network’s chief fact-checker-in-residence got into it over how America responded to the COVID pandemic, and the two obviously had grievances to get off their chests. The conversation looked less like an interview and more like a holiday dinner after one too many eggnog martinis.

Things got heated when Bash pushed the line she’s pushed for years: Trump bears the blame, governors closed things because hospitals were overrun, Fauci didn’t shut down America.

RFK correctly called BS.

Fauci’s own private diary entries show him actively engineering the closures he later denied under oath. March 9, 2020, Fauci advised New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to close schools in Westchester’s Orthodox Jewish communities. Six days later, he “convinced” Mayor Bill de Blasio to close New York City’s schools (de Blasio, per Fauci’s diary, “had already decided based on what I was saying on TV”), then went further, telling the mayor he should close the bars and restaurants too. De Blasio said he’d base it on Fauci’s recommendation.

I’m sure the “most famous scientist in the world” was giggling, penning that into the burn book.

Days later, Fauci advised de Blasio to push full shelter-in-place for the entire city over Cuomo’s objections, promising to lean on the governor himself. He privately celebrated convincing Trump to extend “15 Days to Slow the Spread” into a 30-day lockdown, calling it a “good outcome” that avoided ending mitigation “prematurely.” By October 2020, on CBS, he’d said the quiet part out loud: he recommended the president shut the country down.

Yet by 2022, once the learning-loss data and the empty ICUs became impossible to ignore, Fauci pivoted: he’d had nothing to do with school closures; the “default position” was always to keep kids in class. Wrong — the diary is the receipt. He was the top-down architect leaning on mayors and governors to do his bidding, while the press treated their compliance as spontaneous local wisdom.

Now Bash is doing damage control for the media’s image, but the damage is already done. Lockdowns shuttered 3.5 million businesses, cratered childhood education, and left the U.S. with some of the worst excess-mortality numbers among developed nations, because one man’s private certainty got laundered into public consensus, and nobody in the press box asked him to show his work.

Then Bash asked what RFK would do differently when the next pandemic hits (because, according to her experts, it’s going to happen within 10 years).

RFK quickly remarked that he’d protect constitutional rights and end the censorship that silenced dissenting doctors the first time around. Bash tried to pivot. RFK didn’t let her. “That was the job of CNN,” he told her. “To put the chyrons up on how many people are dying, to get people to comply.”

“You were part of the problem. There was absolute press malpractice. Your job is a fierce skepticism towards authority, and you weren’t doing that. You were beating up people who were dissenting.”

Boom.

And he’s absolutely correct. Take the lab-leak theory for example. Fauci privately noted the Wuhan market was an “amplifier,” not the source, and scientists on a February 2020 call he joined raised serious concerns about lab manipulation at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Publicly, the “Proximal Origin” paper (shaped with input from the Fauci circle) declared a lab origin “not plausible.” CNN ran with it. Lab leak was a “conspiracy theory,” “comic book” stuff, “widely debunked,” a “Trump talking point.” Then-CNN president Jeff Zucker reportedly ordered staff not to chase it. When former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield said it was most likely a lab origin, CNN framed it as “controversial” and “without evidence.” Only years later, once FBI and court documents leaned toward the lab theory, did the network quietly soften the ridicule.

Because ostensibly it’s their job to “tell the truth to the American people,” once the truth becomes convenient.

CNN did the same with the mortality numbers. Fauci’s own February 2020 diary put the case fatality rate at 0.2%–0.3%, closer to a bad flu once mild and asymptomatic cases were counted. Weeks later, in congressional testimony, he told lawmakers the rate was 2%–3%, settling near 1% — 10 times deadlier than seasonal flu. The scarier number is the one that stuck; CNN ran the catastrophe models and sidelined the seroprevalence data that quickly told a calmer story.

The network also frightened parents silly into vaccinating their healthy kids. Which RFK rightfully pointed out. He charged that CNN’s job was “scaring people.” From late 2021 on, CNN treated pediatric vaccination as an unalloyed moral imperative; “Kids 5 to 11 can now get vaccinated. Here’s why it’s safe.” Segments pushed shots for children under 5 the moment the FDA authorized them. Jill Biden’s CNN op-ed urged parents that the vaccine was “the best way” to protect kids. Anchors and experts framed hesitation as dangerous, citing every hospitalization while downplaying the extremely low risk of severe disease in healthy children and the emerging myocarditis signal in adolescent males.

By 2022, Florida’s health department, citing the data, said healthy five- to 17-year-olds “may not benefit.” Randomized trials showed the shots reduced short-term symptomatic infection but offered negligible absolute risk reduction against severe outcomes for low-risk kids. Transmission benefits evaporated with variants. Yet CNN kept up the pressure, treating parental caution as anti-science. RFK asked Bash to present a single study proving net benefit for children. She pivoted to “data upon data” about adult mortality and “misinformation deaths.”

A master of misdirection.

If the world does see another pandemic, it’s good to know certain scientists won’t have their First Amendment right stripped away for saying an uncomfortable truth. Take Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta. In October 2020, the trio authored the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing for focused protection of the vulnerable instead of blanket lockdowns. NIH Director Francis Collins wanted a “quick and devastating” takedown. Fauci called it “nonsense and very dangerous.” On CNN, a former Harvard professor announced that herd immunity was “another word for mass murder.” The chorus followed, branding the authors reckless cranks.

Today, Bhattacharya runs the NIH. The “crazies” keep getting promoted; the experts who got it catastrophically wrong still want the benefit of the doubt.

Look, reporters get things wrong sometimes; so do experts. But there’s a difference between an honest miss and five years of “trust the experts” deployed as a gag order, while the experts secretly admitted they weren’t sure.

Fauci privately knew mortality was far lower and later walked back school closures. CNN treated lab leak as taboo and pediatric vaccines as non-negotiable. Dissenters were “beaten up.” And now that the diaries, the excess-death data, the learning-loss studies, and the intelligence assessments are public, the same network hosts are rightfully getting grilled for gaslighting us all for years.

And RFK called them on it live, to a quivering, culpable Bash. The ultimate fact-check. And it felt good to watch.