Paranoia pandemic: Conservative media baselessly blame swine flu outbreak on immigrants
Following an outbreak of swine flu
in Mexico and subsequent
confirmation of dozens of cases in the United States, conservative media
personalities have baselessly blamed Mexican immigrants for spreading the
disease across the border, continuing their long-standing trend of scapegoating
immigrants while discussing major news stories. However, Rear Adm. Anne Schuchat, M.D., the interim deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s science and public health program, stated in an April 26 media
availability: “I know that we have confirmation of disease in
people who have traveled to Mexico, and I don’t know the numbers, but I know that that is
definitely the case in some of our cases, and that’s an important factor to
consider.” Indeed, several media reports on U.S. swine flu patients indicated that they had recently traveled to
Mexico.
Examples of conservative media
figures blaming Mexican immigrants for the spread of swine flu into the
United
States include:
- During the April 24 edition of his
nationally syndicated
radio show, Michael Savage stated: “Make no mistake about it: Illegal aliens are the
carriers of the new strain of
human-swine avian flu from Mexico.” Savage also stated, “If we lived in saner times, the borders
would be closed immediately.” Savage went on to theorize that the outbreak might
be part of a bioterrorism threat: “[C]ould this be a terrorist attack through Mexico? Could our dear friends in the radical
Islamic countries have concocted this virus and planted it in
Mexico knowing that you, [Homeland Security Secretary]
Janet Napolitano, would do nothing to stop the flow of human traffic from
Mexico?” Savage continued: “[T]hey are a perfect mule — perfect mules for
bringing this virus into America. But you wouldn’t think that way, would you? Because you are
incapable of protecting America’s homeland, Napolitano.” Savage also stated: “How do you protect
yourself? What can you do? I’ll tell
you what I’m going to do, and I don’t give a damn if you don’t like what I’m going to say.
I’m going to have no contact anywhere with an illegal alien, and that starts in the
restaurants.” He added, “I will have no any illegal alien workers around me. I will not have them in any of my properties, I will not have them anywhere near
me.”
- During the April 27
edition of his nationally
syndicated radio show, Neal Boortz asked: “[W]hat better way to sneak a virus into this country than
give it to Mexicans? Right? I mean, one out of every 10 people born in
Mexico is already living up here, and
the rest are trying to get here. So you give — you give — you let this virus
just spread in Mexico, where they don’t have a
CDC.” Boortz went on to say: “So if you want to get that epidemic into this country, get
it going real good and hot south of the border. And, you know, then just spread
a rumor that there’s construction jobs available somewhere, and here it comes.
Because we’re not gonna do anything to stop them from coming across the
border.”
- In an April 25 blog post titled “Hey, maybe we’ll
finally get serious about borders now,” syndicated columnist and Fox News
contributor Michelle Malkin
suggested that the outbreak was due to the United States’
“uncontrolled immigration,” writing: “I’ve blogged for years about the spread of contagious diseases from
around the world into the U.S. as a result of uncontrolled immigration. We’ve
heard for years from reckless open-borders ideologues who continue to insist there’s nothing to worry about. And
we’ve heard for years that calling any attention to the dangers of allowing untold numbers
of people to pass across our borders and through our other ports of entry
without proper medical screening — as required of every legal
visitor/immigrant to this country — is RAAAACIST.” Malkin added: “9/11 didn’t
convince the open-borders zealots to put down their race cards and confront
reality. Maybe the threat of their sons or daughters contracting a deadly virus
spread from south of the border to their Manhattan prep schools will.” Contrary to
Malkin’s suggestion, an April 27 Associated Press article reported of the
New York City high school students infected with
swine flu to whom she referred: “Officials think they started getting sick after
some students returned from the spring break trip to Cancun.”
Additionally, on the April 27
edition of his nationally
syndicated radio show, Fox News host Glenn Beck stated: “Gee, it would be nice if we had border
security now, wouldn’t it?” Beck went on to assert: “But if you are a family and you’re down in
Mexico and you’re dying and
those in America are not, why wouldn’t you
flood this border? Why wouldn’t you come across this border? It’s exactly what I
warned of — different scenario, different reason of — I was talking about
economic collapse. People start to come and rush this border, then what happens?
Gee, it would be nice if we had some border
security.”
Media
Matters for America has previously documented that CNN host Lou Dobbs
repeatedly defended the false claim by CNN correspondent Christine Romans that
the United States has seen a
dramatic increase in leprosy cases, which Dobbs said was caused in part by “unscreened illegal immigrants coming into
this country primarily from South Asia.”
Media Matters also noted
that Fox News host Bill O’Reilly replied, “You might be right,” to a caller on his radio show who claimed that with the
numerous diseases “the illegals” purportedly bring to this country, “each one of
those people is a biological weapon,” and that the impact of illegal immigration
“equals and surpasses the impact of 9-11.”
From the April 26 CDC media
availability:
OPERATOR: The next is
from Mike Stobbe, the Associated Press. Your line is open.STOBBE: Hi, thanks for taking the
question. Of the 20 U.S.
confirmed cases, how many have been to Mexico? And also, do you have any information on the
transmission — you said you believe transmission is occurring from person to
person. Is it occurring past the initial infection — like person A infects person B but is it then infecting person C? Do we know that yet? Also, I have a follow-up.SHUCHAT:
You know, I know that we have
confirmation of disease in people who have traveled to Mexico,
and I don’t know the numbers, but I know that that is definitely the case in
some of our cases, and that’s an important factor to consider. We have a lot of
travel to Mexico back and
forth between the U.S. and Mexico,
and we certainly are looking for illness in those people, so we have asked
people to test and we’re finding some illness.
From the April 24 edition of Talk Radio Network’s The Savage Nation:
SAVAGE: It is The Savage Nation, Rock ‘n’ Roll Friday. What a horrible day it is.
It gets worse by the day. Each day this administration brings America
closer to the brink. One moronic professor after another, destroying America’s dignity and past, let alone our safety. Now,
I’m going to talk about the horrible,
horrible story of illegal aliens bringing a deadly new flu strain
into the United States of
America. Make no mistake about it: Illegal aliens are the
carriers of the new strain of
human-swine avian flu from Mexico.
Make no mistake about it:
Our incompetents at the CDC will hide this from you. Make no
mistake about it: This
is a disaster. Now, if
you thought Turista was bad, wait
until you get human-swine avian flu from Mexico.This is the latest zoonotic
infection, and I will
explain to you, my listeners, on
The Savage Nation
what a zoonotic infection is. This is a never-before-seen mixture of swine, human, and avian viruses. It is an Influenza A
virus. It is real. It
is real — it’s a
knockout punch. The question to me is
– there’s only one question in my mind, which is this: Is this a terrorist attack?
Did these demonic terrorists make a new form of Influenza A virus never before
been seen, which is a
mixture of human,
swine, and avian viruses mixed together? I don’t know. We don’t have enough
information. But what you do learn today on this program, and I suggest you listen very carefully — you’re not going to learn
on any other talk show or television show in America, and that is because I have an actual
Ph.D. in epidemiology, human nutrition, and medical anthropology from the University of California
at Berkley. Does that make me the world’s leading virologist? Not at all. But it certainly makes me aware of what’s
going on.[...]
SAVAGE: This new Influenza A virus
is potentially fatal –
I will tell you that right now. There should be no trade and no travel between
Mexico and the U.S. If
we lived in saner times, the borders would be closed immediately. We wouldn’t
worry about money. We wouldn’t worry about making sure that the heroin addicts get their
fixes tomorrow. We wouldn’t worry about the fact that stockbrokers in New York won’t get their
snow tomorrow. What we’d be worried about is the public health. But since we no longer have a public health department in America, since the CDC has long been compromised and
has become anything but a public health agency, more like a — well, there’s no longer a public health
agency. Public safety is the last thing on its agenda; the most
important thing is the gay agenda and making certain that nobody talks about AIDS.[...]
SAVAGE: What is interesting to me is that Mexico
has not suffered a
serious flu epidemic before, which leads me to ask something that the
dingbat running Homeland Security, who is attacking U.S. Marines, returning soldiers,
anti-abortion activists
and anti-immigrant activists. Why
don’t you do your job, Napolitano, you bum you? And why don’t you ask yourself,
you dumb fool you, could this be a terrorist attack through Mexico? Could our dear friends in the radical
Islamic countries have concocted this virus and planted it in
Mexico knowing that you, Janet Napolitano, would do nothing to stop
the flow of human
traffic from Mexico? And they are a perfect mule — perfect mules
for bringing this virus into America. But you wouldn’t think that way, would you? Because you are
incapable of protecting America’s homeland, Napolitano.[...]
SAVAGE: Talking about the new flu
strain that is emerging out of Mexico, and our incompetent and corrupt CDC has
issued no travel restrictions. Do you hear this? No warnings have been issued
about travel to Mexico by our corrupt, incompetent so-called
scientists at the CDC. Yet in Mexico, 6.1 million students were kept out of
daycare centers, but in
America the lying thieves in
the U.S. government have nothing to say because the
bottom line is more important. You cannot stop the flow of people, drugs, and whatever. After all, our commerce depends upon
on this flow of
drugs, so you can’t
tell people not to go or come from Mexico. This virus has a unique combination of gene segments not
seen in people or pigs before. The virus contains human virus, avian virus from
North America and pig virus from North America, Europe, and Asia. No one’s ever seen it before.I ask you
a question: Where is the dumb moron Janet
Napolitano, head of the Homeland Security Department? Why are they not looking
into this as a possible terrorist attack on America? Now you say, how could this be? Because the demons in
the Islamic world have been trying to modify the influenza virus for years.
We’ve been told about this for years. Some of these scientists are very
clever, and they also
know because of the open borders policy with Mexico, because of the corruption in the
U.S. government, it’s very easy to bring a altered virus into Mexico,
put it into the general population, have them march across the border. They know
the U.S. government is corrupt and incapable of
protecting its people. They can’t stop anything because they don’t want to stop
anything.The
question is, what are we going to do about this? How do you protect
yourself? What can you do? I’ll tell
you what I’m going to do, and I don’t give a damn if you don’t like what I’m going to say.
I’m going to have no contact anywhere with an illegal alien, and that starts in the
restaurants. You want intelligence?
Stop eating at restaurants where they have undocumented workers in
the kitchen. You’re risking your life, moron. You want to be a good liberal? Go and have some wonderful food tonight and
pay no attention to the kitchen. Go ahead, idiot. Go ahead, go and eat in a restaurant now with illegal aliens all
over the kitchen and you don’t know if they were in Mexico yesterday or two days
ago because your wonderful government
doesn’t give a rat’s behind who’s in the kitchen or whether they wiped their
behind with their hands. All they care about is that the borders remain open,
for obvious reasons. No, no, no, I’ll start with restaurants. That’s it; the
door slams shut for me. That’s number one. Number two, I will have
no any illegal alien
workers around me. I
will not have them in
any of my properties, I will not have
them anywhere near me.
From the April 27
edition of Cox Radio Syndication’s The Neal
Boortz Show:
BOORTZ:
Also, is anybody out there interested in the swine flu? Belinda? Are you — I’m
not yet.BELINDA
SKELTON (executive producer): I mean, it’s a little frightening that — what,
they’re not having good results with the antibiotics for
this?BOORTZ:
Well, there is the — there’s the bioterrorism angle. What better — lord –SKELTON:
Are you looking up for the black helicopter?BOORTZ:
Lord, forgive me for I know not what I am about to — what better way to sneak a
virus into this country than give it to Mexicans? Right? I mean, one out of
every 10 people born in Mexico is already living up here, and
the rest are trying to get here. So you give — you give — you let this virus
just spread in Mexico, where they don’t have a CDC.
Now, I’m just — look, I’m just — I’m thinking out loud here, folks. They don’t
have the inoculation programs. They don’t have — they don’t have the ability
down there to fight a burgeoning epidemic as we do in this country. So if you
want to get that epidemic into this country, get it going real good and hot
south of the border. And, you know, then just spread a rumor that there’s
construction jobs available somewhere, and here it comes. Because we’re not
gonna do anything to stop them from coming across the border. I can guarantee
you, political correctness being the way it is in this country, if this was –
how many — how many Mexicans have died of this thing now? But if this was a
full-fledged, deadly, killer epidemic in Mexico
right now, we still would not close the borders to this country. We still
wouldn’t line up the troops and close the borders because that would be a very
politically incorrect thing to do. Besides, it would be racial profiling. So on
the bioterrorism, on the bioterrorism angle, hey, you know, who knows what’s
going on?
From the April 27
edition of Premiere Radio Networks’ The
Glenn Beck Program:
BECK:
Mexico is in real trouble. What
happens to a country that is in that much of an economic dire strait when they
say no public events for possibly four weeks? What happens when the economy
stops in Mexico because of an
emergency in Mexico where no one can spend money?
No one can go to a soccer game, a movie, go out to eat, nothing, for four weeks.
What happens to that economy? Gee, it would be nice if we had border security
now, wouldn’t it? What happens if there is a rash of deaths in Mexico
and it’s not — they’re not dying here? And maybe it’s because it mutated
differently down there, maybe it’s because we have better health care here — I
don’t know. But if you are a family and you’re down in Mexico and you’re dying and those in America
are not, why wouldn’t you flood this border? Why wouldn’t you come across this
border? It’s exactly what I warned of — different scenario, different reason of
– I was talking about economic collapse. People start to come and rush this
border, then what happens? Gee, it would be nice if we had some border security.