Were it not for Operation Mockingbird paving the way, and also the entire Trump Era, in which fake news weirdly blurred boundaries to degrees none of us have fully absorbed and probably cannot without a full psychotic split and subsequent psychic reintegration (I’m just making that up), the fake news during the pandemic would surely achieve a higher absurdity score! But “almost 9” isn’t bad. Had we not needed a more comprehensive scientific research category, we could have grouped some fake research here, and put it over the top. Still, we’re pretty certain The Lancet will publish our brief study of pandemic news if we claim that machine learning did it for us.

As you can well observe, the news has been busy promoting a large portion of the absurdity we have already discussed. With that in mind, consider the irony of a scientific publication on counting fake news in the COVID-19 era being withdrawn.