From my observations at the time, the “of or with covid” and various other distractions started at Swiss Propaganda Research website (now Swiss Policy Research) which published lots of the early trivialisation cherry-picking. From there it got echoed by OffGuardian and UK Column, some of the milder of which the corporate media ran with a couple of weeks later – the Express, Mail and Telegraph particularly – as anti-lockdown material. I don’t know if such papers did the same with the “PCR false positive” fallacy because I got too angry to watch any further, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Seven tons of horseshit is an appropriate response, I feel. The damn papers are always for killing people, foreign or domestic; there’s good money in death.