I am not actually sure some of your things follow; for example, while the virus clearly has a lower fatality rate than Ebola, it also spreads much more effectiv

I am not actually sure some of your things follow; for example, while the virus clearly has a lower fatality rate than Ebola, it also spreads much more effectively than Ebola -- COVID-19 has already killed way more people than Ebola throughout history. I am not aware of the specific article, which could have compared them in many wasys, but I expect this is an example where the claim you're debunking is literally true, but maybe not especially useful because Ebola belongs to a very small class of diseases that are extremely fatal but not very dangerous all told because of the speed with which it kills. The same is true of any seasonal strain of influenza. I am sure the Times is a rag, but most of the comparisons I've seen with other diseases have correctly emphasized that respiratory infections spread so well that even if deaths exist only in the tail of the distribution they have a much higher capacity for carnage than most other infections. This has been a pretty consistent refrain since the beginning. Likewise, it is not true that you can't develop a vaccine for diseases for which natural immunity from exposure is weak or absent. Some vaccines rely on stimulating a similar kind of natural immunity, others teach your immune system to target the pathogen in a different fashion than the natural immunity if any. For COVID-19 specifically there are vaccines on many different delivery platforms. Likewise, the BLM point: the media coverage of the protests was definitely not crystal clear, but one consistent refrain was that the virus spreads fairly poorly outdoors (or, in fact, in areas with high air circulation) when wearing masks. The initial "reopen" "protests" were mostly people not wearing masks. The later BLM protests were mostly people wearing masks. Compliance was not 100% and obviously some degree of risk is involved in any protest, but as a whole I think the tone of the reporting was fairly reasonable. You may be conflating the tone of public health officials -- who largely engaged in (politically motivated) cost-benefit analysis about the protests by saying things like "whatever risk of COVID there is, the risk of violence in these communities is higher, so the protests are a public health good." I agree that these statements were not especially helpful or informed. IFR reporting has been consistently <1%. I think you may be conflating early CFR reporting, which sometimes made claims about 2-5% CFR. That was based on the best available reporting and was not irresponsible at the time. What we've learned since this is that a large number of cases are asymptomatic, and so with a large testing apparatus we catch a number of infections that never would have become cases. This is still important in terms of managing public health resources and spread. Both the CFR and the IFR are important numbers to understand the dynamics. It is possible some source reported a high IFR rate, but I think even by April we had a fairly good indication that seroprevalence was substantially higher than known cases, and so the IFR would be correspondingly lower than the CFR. Likewise the reporting on hydroxychloroquine. The narrative of reporting seemed pretty consistent: first, some doctors considered hydroxychloroquine as a sort of emergency treatment measure in the early days of the pandemic because it was believed something about the mechanism of action that's beyond me might be fruitful. In parallel to this kind of "battlefield medicine", a small number of trials and studies proceeded. These found mixed but generally negative results with the administration of hydroxychloroquine. At the same time, a collection of right-populist leaders around the world (especially Bolsonaro and Trump) advocated aggressively for hydroxychloroquine on the basis of either attempting to provide hope or else delusion, rather than evidence. This was followed by scary sounding reporting of isolated cases of idiots prophylactically taking either hydroxychloroquine or something that sounds vaguely like it, in some cases fatally. Media reporting cautioned people not to follow unsubstantiated medical advice, while politicians proclaimed there was a miracle cure. I think it is fair to say that people should not take serious prescription medicines prophylactically because they heard about it from a Facebook post. This presents both serious challenges to the supply chain (actual needs for hydroxychloroquine e.g. for malaria prevention were facing a run on supplies) and a risk of contraindication for those taking it without medical supervision. I agree that by much later in the year, say the mid summer, some of the reporting on hydroxychloroquine made it out as though it was a useless drug not used for anything, when in reality it is a perfectly usable drug that simply doesn't treat or prevent COVID-19, but you have to realize that the major misinformation there was not from media, it was from the moron with the world's largest megaphone. I agree that reporting has not been perfect or crystal clear. This is a tough emerging thing that we knew nothing about a year ago and because the entire world stopped, people have demanded answers faster than they existed, and that's led to a feeding frenzy of reporting about anecdote, and a situation where ordinary and understandable missteps explode in magnitude. But I think everything about the circumstances suggests charity and flexibility. I think we should also critically examine how we contribute to the problems of reporting and information spread, and especially how we project certainty when there is none (I think a pretty severe problem in your post) -- this is especially weird when things become politicized in a partisan way (also an undertone in your post). Maybe that wasn't your intent. Maybe we see these issues similarly and you just interpret the magnitude of media culpability differently. But my best read is that there's more wrong with the claims in your post than there is with those same claims in the majority of basically reputable media.