The media has been proclaiming the 2020 motorcycle event in Sturgis, South Dakota a “COVID superspreader” since it occurred last month. Now we know that the claims are false.

The rally has been held since 1938 and has an 82-year history of annual gatherings (except for 1942 and 1944 when WWII saw strict gasoline rationing). So, the organizers weren’t about to let something as absurd as the coronavirus keep them from meeting.

But since before the event occurred, liberals have been attacking the Sturgis event by calling it a “superspreader” of COVID. And after the rally finished on August 16, the media dredged up the claim that more than half of the 460,000 participants contracted the virus.

Now we know for a fact that this claim is a lie.

The lie was spread by a “study” that was so flawed that no legitimate science outlet would publish it.

Per PJMedia:

In a report titled “IZA DP No. 13670: The Contagion Externality of a Superspreading Event: The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and COVID-19,” claimed that “large crowds, coupled with minimal mask-wearing and social distancing by attendees” turned the rally into a “superspreader” infecting 260,000 people. Authors Dhaval M. Dave, Andrew I. Friedson, Drew McNichols, and Joseph J. Sabia concluded that “the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally generated public health costs of approximately $12.2 billion.” The public health risks of Sturgis were so rigorously studied by the authors that “no medical journal would touch it,” as bestselling author and public health writer Alex Berenson noted on Tuesday. Instead, the report was posted on the website of the obscure Insitute of Labor Economics, a leftwing German thinktank.

Naturally, the media gobbled it up and regurgitated it as if it were fact.

But to date less than 30 people have been said to have contracted COVID from attending the rally.

And weeks later, one man who attended the biker event is said to have died from COVID, though he had other conditions pre-existing.

This week, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem slammed the fake study.

“This report isn’t science; it’s fiction. Under the guise of academic research, this report is nothing short of an attack on those who exercised their personal freedom to attend Sturgis. Predictably, some in the media breathlessly report on this non-peer reviewed model, built on incredibly faulty assumptions that do not reflect the actual facts and data here in South Dakota,” she said.

“At one point, academic modeling also told us that South Dakota would have 10,000 COVID patients in the hospital at our peak. Today, we have less than 70. I look forward to good journalists, credible academics, and honest citizens repudiating this nonsense,” she added.

South Dakota took a balanced approach to fighting #COVID19. Many in the media disagree with our respect for freedom. They'll continue to attack us for the path that we've taken, but South Dakota is proof that freedom works, even in the face of a global pandemic. pic.twitter.com/1vKU3R6Rmk — Governor Kristi Noem (@govkristinoem) September 9, 2020

The study led the media to claim there would at least be hundreds, if not thousands of dead due to the rally. They ended up with less than 30 cases and one already sick man dead.

And yet, no media outlets are retracting their lies.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston.