The children of an unvaccinated, deceased COVID patient suggested that Tucker Carlson and Fox News are at least partly to blame for their father’s vaccine hesitancy and subsequent death.
45 year-old Patrick Lane was the unvaccinated, 45 year-old father of Katie and Evan Lane who died of COVID recently. Appearing on CNN Monday, Katie Lane told anchor John Berman why her father had not gotten vaccinated.
LANE: There's multiple reasons, I think. One of which was some of the media that he ingested. He wasn't by any means far right. He was right in the middle, and he consumed media from both sides. And just some of the misinformation on one of those sides made him hesitant. So, he was going to wait for FDA approval, but by the time that Pfizer had been approved, it was already too late.
Later, Katie Lane said that in her father’s final call to her stepmother, he said he wished he had gotten vaccinated.
Then Berman pressed her about the “misinformation” she said her father had gotten from the media:
BERMAN: And, Katie, you said from one media source in particular he was getting misinformation -- or he was getting information that led him to be hesitant on vaccines. Who? I mean who was he listening to?
LANE: He -- he watched some Tucker Carlson videos on YouTube,. And some of those videos involved some misinformation about vaccines. And I believe that that played a role.
John Amato, my boss at Crooks and Liars, has called for criminal charges against right-wing media outlets that are repeatedly promoting deadly misinformation. While I’d love to see that happen, I’m not a lawyer, much less a criminal prosecutor, so I don’t know what that would take.
I do know that you don’t need a prosecutor to file a civil suit. I also know that money talks to Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch. For example, as soon as voting technology companies Dominion and Smartmatic began making the noises that eventually resulted in two lawsuits amounting to more than $4 billion in claims, Fox suddenly cared more about election truth, at least with regard to voting technology. (The network still gives the Big Lie a wink and a nod in other respects.)
We know that Fox watchers under 65 are less likely to get vaccinated. We also know that the current surge of cases is among the unvaccinated and worse in red states, filled with Fox watchers. Surely there’s a trial lawyer out there willing and able to take on the case(s) of anyone who can demonstrate that they or their loved one needlessly exposed themself to COVID based on public health disinformation!
Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch obviously don’t care that they are literally pushing death for dough. It’s long past time to make them pay up!
Meanwhile, you can watch Katie and Evan Lane grieve their regretful father’s needless death below, from CNN’s September 20, 2021 New Day.
Katie Lane's dad had helped her move into her first apartment a month before he died of Covid-19.
— New Day (@NewDay) September 20, 2021
"He said, 'I'm proud of you, Katie bug.' ... If I'd known that that was going to be my last time seeing my dad in person, alive and well, I don't think I would have let go of him." pic.twitter.com/MwKRBVVPNR
I do feel for people who aren’t regular viewers and believe Fox is a reputable network and Carlson a regular commentator. But regular Fox viewers, deep down, know that Fox routinely lies about any and all who are not part of the Fox tribe. I just don’t know if regular viewers realize that Fox’s brutality and callousness doesn’t stop with their adversaries. They are equally open to lying to their own viewers as long as there is profit in it for them.
