I see people on here every day asking how the pandemic and public health/masks/safety recommendations got politicized.

And this is really the answer: since the beginning, places like Fox have used it as a cudgel against Democrats. They adopted a masks bad/distancing bad view. https://twitter.com/goangelo/status/1315679553264779271

They spent months accusing anyone who took the pandemic seriously of a.) only doing it because they thought it would hurt Trump, b.) calling it virtue signaling, c.) mocking them as weak.

News media built around the promotion of reactionary politics harms society, as this shows.

Overall, it’s not necessarily a bad strategy, politically. They can sit around mocking people for preparing. If it turns out to not be as big a deal as feared, they pat themselves on the back. If it’s bad, they can shift to angrily calling people insensitive who point this out

This plays out a lot when people discuss storms, for instance. It’s been especially true during the pandemic.