It isn't just the likes of podcaster Joe Rogan coming under fire for challenging popular narratives regarding Covid-19 and America's response to it.
'With 5 million readers, David Leonhardt, the author of The New York Times “The Morning” newsletter, is arguably the most influential of the Covid influencers.
He has positioned himself as the pundit who punches holes in public health orthodoxy, who shuns the “bad news bias” of journalism, who offers soothing rationality — grounded in his years of Pulitzer-winning reporting on economics — in the face of what he calls “Covid alarmism.”
Over the last few months, a long-simmering critical conversation among public health experts about Leonhardt’s take and his outsize influence has become more audible. And we don’t just mean on Twitter.
Notable doctors and scientists have written to the Times, individually or in groups, to poke holes in Leonhardt’s coverage of the pandemic.
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