The Deadly Spread Of The Murdoch Variant There's a renewed Covid crisis in this country because powerful forces, led by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, want there to be one. The United States is the only country in the world that's simultaneously trying to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic while battling a homegrown, deep-pocketed political and media crusade determined to keep the pandemic going. Call it the Murdoch variant. And it's proving to be deadly. While a staff of fully-vaccinated hosts rage against an extraordinarily safe and efficient vaccine, Fox News is doing what no other outlet has done in the history of cable news, or even broadcast television has done — it's deliberately getting people killed during a public health crisis by feeding eagerly gullible red state viewers a mountain of lies.