The hosts of Fox & Friends used an op-ed in The Washington Post about not feeling ashamed if you wind up with a breakthrough case of COVID as an excuse to push more dangerous, irresponsible anti-vax rhetoric on their propaganda network.

Here's Will Cain, Carly Shimkus, and Todd Piro turning the article on its head and griping about people supposedly "shaming" the unvaccinated, ignoring that the vaccines are working and keeping people with breakthrough cases out of the hospital, and lying about whether wearing masks helps to slow the spread of the virus.

SHIMKUS: There's also a Washington Post headline, an article that really caught our attention, because apparently, all of us should feel ashamed if we catch COVID-19. The headline is: “Thousands Who 'Followed The Rules' Are About To Get Covid, They Shouldn't Be Ashamed.”

And they have some tips. They say “Acknowledge it. Set it aside in favor of proper health protocols. Don't over-explain the situation. Consider it a learning experience. Keep in mind that you can't control what others do or think. Practice self-compassion and remember you're not a failure.”

I mean, this was just so cringe-worthy and I said that at the top that if you catch COVID we should feel ashamed, because implied in the headlines is that even though they're saying that you shouldn't feel ashamed now, that if you catch COVID at one point, there's a level of shame in there. It's always been, Todd, this sort of moral superiority that people on the left have when it comes to COVID-19.

PIRO: Yeah, and that's the question. Why is there this emotional baggage attached to COVID, to begin with? It's an illness. People get sick. It kind of is the whole human experience. Why would there be shaming in the first place?

So I think we know the answer to that. It's because of the way the liberal media and liberals, in general, have handled this virus, basically saying you are unvaccinated there in Trump country so you're the ones that are causing this virus. It's your fault, when in reality we all know that is not the case.

We all know that the numbers that show this is affecting every city in every country throughout the world. And when you look at the blue states, for example, you oftentimes see higher numbers. But again politics should be out of this. It is irrelevant whether you are red, blue, purple, doesn't matter.

People get sick. We don't shame people for cancer. We don't shame people for heart disease. We shouldn't shame people for this. It's amazing what we are doing in this day and age.

[…]

CAIN: And really quickly just to give the final word on what you set up there Carly, you know we've spent the better part of two years pretending, or at least, not we, you know much of, you know, I don't want to use these words as like over-generalization, but they serve useful, much of the mainstream media, and yes it comes from politicians largely on the left, have politicized the idea of COVID and getting COVID has been treated like getting an STD.

If you got sick, you did something to deserve it, you went unvaccinated, lived in Florida, you didn't wear your mask. They treated it like these were things that good rule followers would have done to protect themselves.

But, as time goes on in reality sets in, they have to amend that judgment, or at least try to amend that judgment, because it was absurd from the beginning. They ignored blue state infections while decrying Florida. They pretended like masks would protect them all along. They did not.

Now they're having to reconcile themselves to the fact that vaccination status also isn't a big differentiator. When what do we do? Well, treat it with compassion, the way you should've done it all along, by the way.

SHIMKUS: Yeah, I know and it's so wild that you know, tomorrow in New York City there's going to be a city-mandated vaccine mandate on all private businesses, which is such wild government overreach for the government, de Blasio, who's by the way who's leaving office in like a second, to implement something that affects all workers.

That's not the point of government. America was founded to, you know, inhibit large government, big government and keep it small. And this is, like I said, such a massive overreach, and that vaccine mandate, it's going to be implemented, Todd, when we are learning that even vaccinated people are spreading omicron, so why are we even doing it?

PIRO: Right. Not to get graphic, but omicron exists in the upper passageway of the nose and it exists there and it can be spread from there and vaccine status, yes, it may help some, but it's not a panacea.

People need to be safe and do what they need to do to keep themselves safe while realizing, look, going forward if this does continue to present itself like the common cold and spread like the common cold, it's going to in all likelihood become another common cold that you are going to get at some point in your life.

And considering all 8 billion or so people on the planet will likely get it, it's probably not something that we should be shaming each other about the first place and second, creating support groups on Washington Post in order to help people will deal with the fact that they got COVID. You got sick. Take the medicine i.e. therapeutics plug there, and hopefully, you will get better and we will all move on with society the way it was in 2019.

I hate to break it to them, but people who lived in counties that voted for Trump had six times higher COVID deaths than counties that voted for Biden.

I'm guessing we'd see some similar numbers for Fox viewers. As we've discussed here before, Fox continues to do everything humanly possible to kill off as many of its viewers as possible. Doesn't seem like a great business model to me, but apparently, the Murdochs are fine with it as long as they believe it helps Republicans politically.