> the lies perpetrated in the media are not helping me at all.

I'm responding to this separately because I want to keep this more general point separate from my responses to your more specific questions.

I agree that lies perpetrated in the media are not helping anyone; but my point is that the lies are on all sides--every media source perpetrates lies. To take just the COVID example, even the simple number of how many people have died "of COVID", which is trumpeted in the media all the time, is a lie. The fact is that nobody knows what that number is; it's impossible to find out because the relevant data is not even available for every case. And even if it were, judgment calls would be involved in individual cases as to whether COVID was really the primary cause of death.

One could argue that the number used in the media should be close to the "real" number, because the various errors involved should to some extent offset each other. But nobody makes that argument. The number is simply asserted as fact and no argument is allowed. What's more, if the argument were made, it would be a weak one: once we admit that there are sources of error in the reported "COVID death" number, the best way to allow for them is to estimate excess deaths due to COVID--the deaths that would not have occurred had the person not caught COVID. Nobody has a reliable estimate of that number; the excess death estimates that are available (e.g., the one on the CDC's website [1]) explicitly say that they can't pick out the excess deaths due to COVID from the excess deaths due to other causes, and that they also can't estimate whether some jurisdictions had fewer deaths than expected--which of course would lower the overall excess death count for the country. What information we do have indicates to me that the reported COVID death number for the US, at least, is probably a substantial overestimate. But that's a judgment call about which reasonable people can differ--which in itself is enough to make the media insistence on that number a lie.

Furthermore, even if we have established that some particular death or set of deaths had COVID as a primary cause, that still doesn't tell us why it happened. Did that person not take precautions? Did someone else close to them not take precautions and they didn't allow for that? Was it just bad luck--someone who did take reasonable precautions but got COVID anyway because no precaution is perfect? Or were they, say, in a nursing home which was forced by a state governor to accept COVID infected patients from hospitals even though the nursing home had no way to quarantine those people and keep them separate from the other residents? We have some estimates of how many deaths were due to the latter cause, and they're not small numbers--yet that same state governor got an Emmy award. And for most cases in the US, we don't have that information at all. Which means the overall numbers tell us nothing useful about what to do to prevent further deaths. Certainly lockdowns don't seem to be helping: the areas with the strictest lockdowns also seem to be having the worst spikes in case numbers (although much the same caveats that apply to the death numbers also apply to the case numbers). Yet we are told constantly by the media and public health authorities that lockdowns are necessary.

In short, while it is true that "COVID is a hoax" is a lie, so are many other claims about COVID made by politicians and in the media. And, as you say, the politicians and the media do not care about the impact their lies have on everyone. They only care about the benefit to themselves. Not a good situation.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm