Page 18 - Fear Unmasked Flipbook

FEAR UNMA S KED

has been debate over how this disease originated,
we know COVID-19 originated in China, and for a
while, it was little more than a story with few details
reported infrequently by the mainstream media.
However, as America was going about its business
and growing the economy at a record-setting rate,
Neil Ferguson—the director of the Abdul Latif
Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics

(J-IDEA), the head of the Department of Infectious
Disease Epidemiology in the School of Public Health,
and the Vice-Dean for Academic Development in the
Faculty of Medicine, all at Imperial College, London—
released a projection in February 2020 that would
become the FEAR fuel that coronavirus pandemic
panic needed to go viral on social media and traditional

media. Neil Ferguson projected that 500,000 citizens of
the United Kingdom population would die from this
new disease and that the United States alone would
experience a shocking 2.2 million deaths.
Once the world began to learn of Neil Ferguson’s
predictions, the right-wing and left-wing media
fanned the flames of fear related to the pandemic
panic and these headlines then turned into an all-out
dumpster fire of panic as people began sharing these

fears, and doomsday predictions on their personal
social media accounts. Because the average person
now spends over eleven hours a day consuming

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