Don Young refuses to take responsibility for his uninformed 'beer virus' rant

The new claim by Rep. Don Young, who is running against Alyse Galvin for Congress, that he changed his position on the "beer virus" only "when it became serious" is nonsense.

COVID-19 was serious when Young called it the beer virus on March 13 and claimed it was all media hysteria But the oldest Congressman was seriously inattentive. I suspect that one reason for his inattention is that he has long boasted about his inability to use a computer, which is one way to remain uninformed.

“This beer virus I call it, the coronavirus, I call it the beer virus, I thought you’d like that,” Young said. That was the same day on which Trump, who was trying to play down the virus, declared a national emergency.

“We’re not achieving. We’re not looking. We’re stopping. We’re canceling,” Young complained.

“And when you think about it how many flu epidemics we’ve had in America today? 169 cases. 169 cases. There’re going to be more, may be more. But I’d say the exciting part about if you just look even in China where this thing originated, it peaked and it’s going down. It will happen here in the United States,” Young said that day.

Fifty-eight people in the U.S. had died by then and there were nearly 10,000 cases, not the 169 claimed by Young.

Nearly 200,000 Americans have died since Young told senior citizens in Mat-Su to not worry about the virus and go about their daily lives.

“This is blown out of proportion about how deadly this is. It’s deadly but it’s not nearly as deadly as the other viruses we have. But we respond, I’ll call it the hysteria concept,” Young said on March 13.

Young had skipped a vote on COVID-19 relief in Congress so he could campaign in Alaska. He said the measure he wasn’t in Washington to vote on was a “dumb bill” packed with socialist items he opposed.

“We’re going to borrow the money from future generations to solve the problem right now that’s been created primarily by hysteria,” said Young. “If I’m going to be stuck somewhere I want to be stuck in Alaska. I don’t want to be there with that bunch of monkeys, I want to be here.”

The only reason we know anything about this is that Frontiersman reporter Tim Rockey covered the event. That led to coverage in the Anchorage Daily News and by the Associated Press.

Young’s publicity office, which exists to sanitize Young’s image, would never release a statement or a tape that featured such unhinged remarks.

Thirteen days after his beer virus rant, Young’s staff sat the oldest man in Congress down before a camera for damage control.

“Weeks ago I did not fully grasp the severity of this crisis, but clearly we are in the midst of an urgent public health emergency,” Young said, reading from a teleprompter.

This speech was reported as an “apology,” but that’s not what it was.

Four days later, Young appeared at one of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s early COVID-19 shows and he denied much of what he had said in his forced apology. He also claimed that he did not say on March 13 when he was recorded saying about the COVID-19 measure being a “dumb bill” and how he had opposed it because of its socialist provisions and that media hysteria was the real problem. The question and his denial is near the 27-minute mark of this March 30 video.

“No, I didn’t say that, number one. Number two, I probably would have voted for it but that was the very beginning of this pandemic and there was a lot of questions about it then,” he said, 17 days after the beer virus speech.

After denying that he had called it a dumb bill or blamed media hysteria, Young pretended that anything he said or didn’t say two-and-a-half weeks earlier was irrelevant ancient history.

“We can go back in history and decide what’s been said and what has not been said, but now we’re facing this I call a classic problem and we’re handling it very well, the governor and with the other two senators and the body as a whole,” he said.

The beer virus news coverage led to national ridicule. His young employees tried to clean up the mess, even inventing the idea that he wrote: “Knowledge is one of our best defenses against the spread of Coronavirus."

Jump ahead to this week.

On Tuesday, on Talk of Alaska, Young said the COVID-19 pandemic had become “serious” after his “beer virus” speech, not before.

That’s not true.

In another interview with Lori Townsend of Alaska Public Media, Young claimed that the media misrepresented his beer virus speech. “Everybody took it the wrong way other than the audience didn’t. But the media did. So I’m not asking for excuses, I’m just saying times change.”

He’s not asking for excuses. He’s making excuses.

He told the public radio audience Tuesday, "Earlier on when I mentioned the beer virus and I've said this before—it was named corona—I have lived through about four different pandemics in my life. And this one brought the attention. And I worry about people getting panicky and responding maybe not really to reality, but the fact is, they did not know, I did not know how serious this would be. And it became serious. And I changed my position the fact it is serious.”

Anyone paying attention knew on March 13 that this was serious. Young wasn’t paying attention. Nearly 200,000 people in the U.S. have died since his beer virus speech.

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