BuzzFeed News really loves to cover superspreader events.
The outlet writes about them often.
There was that time BuzzFeed spread the news about the 32 people who got COVID after attending a wedding in Ohio last year.
“Step right up and buy a copy of the story about the 32 people out 3.75 million cases of Covid who contracted it at Mikayla’s wedding! Can you say I do? Mikaya said it and 32 of her guests said I do have Covid too!”
That was a pressing national interest to embarrass the bride that way.
Then there was the time that then-President Donald Trump introduced Amy Coney Barrett as nominee for the Supreme Court and some people got sick.
“Far from shifting the narrative away from the president’s mishandling of the coronavirus crisis, as his supporters would have hoped, ” BuzzFeed reported, “the event has turned into an emblem of the dangers posed by Trump’s practice of holding largely maskless gatherings without social distancing.”
Which is all the more hilarious reading when you read about how BuzzFeed’s own Christmas party this year became a superspreader event.
Of COVID, of course…so far.
Three staffers have tested positive, positively related to the office party, said Business Insider.
“The outbreak comes as COVID-19 cases surge across New York City, sparking concerns about the highly infectious Omicron variant leading to breakthrough cases among the vaccinated. The three positive employees told Insider they were vaccinated, had received their booster shots, and said they were experiencing mild symptoms,” said BI.
It’s too bad that BuzzFeed didn’t take its own advice about “wearing well-fitting masks, hand hygiene, physical distancing, improving ventilation of indoor spaces, avoiding crowded spaces,” that they just gave out, weeks before their own event.
“The challenge now is to convince people to modify their behavior before things have gotten out of control,” BuzzFeed reported. “Unfortunately, the emergence of Omicron comes just as cases in the U.S. were already starting to tick up again after the decline of the first Delta wave.”
Obviously a lot of people at BuzzFeed don’t turn to BuzzFeed for advice.
Previously, BuzzFeed blamed a Trump rally in Oklahoma for a “surge In COVID-19” in Tulsa even though its own chart shows the number of cases were increasing well before the rally.
It also used a highly questionable study by the University of San Diego’s economics department to call the motorcycle even in Sturgis a “massive superspreader” with 260,000 cases caused and a cost of $12 billion.
The study was debunked by researchers at Johns Hopkins University who said while the event might have caused more cases, the conclusions of massive infections was “relatively weak.”
But bad on BuzzFeed, in any event.
In December 2020, BuzzFeed said that superspreaders are driving infections of COVID-19.
“A small percentage of people are responsible for most coronavirus infections, study after study has shown….Because indoor gatherings pose a higher risk of infection, so-called superspreader events ended up grabbing headlines throughout the year,” BuzzFeed wrote.
Now, BuzzFeed either believed what they wrote, or they didn’t believe it when they held their Christmas Party.
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