I came across a video on Twitter that showed two clips, side by side: a video of the CDC’s Director Rochelle Walensky talking about vaccine effectiveness in March of 2021, and again in August of 2021. I decided to share the clip on the Post-Orthodoxy page on Facebook. I've never seen so many fact check warnings show up for any post we have posted before. Let’s walk through them, in order.
“Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people." Hmm. I went to the link provided and was sent to a Reuters article that told me “Two merged clips of the Centre of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky discussing the protection from COVID-19 for those vaccinated in March 2021 and August 2021 are presented in a way that is missing context.”
Ok, that’s fair. Context is everything. Let’s see the context:
“Speaking on the Rachael Maddow show on MSNBC in March 2021, in the first clip Walensky said that CDC data showed that vaccinated people “don’t carry the virus” and “don’t get sick.”
Well, time has passed and now we know that that’s not how things played out. The CDC data was wrong. People who get one of the COVID vaccines can still get sick with COVID, and can carry the virus, just as people do without one of the COVID vaccines. But that’s how science works; you make a hypothesis and see if it plays out the way you hope. It didn’t go as they hoped. People trusted the CDC director and spokespersons, and Anthony Fauci from the NIH, and many other politicians, scientists, and news sources, that if they got one of those shots, they wouldn’t get sick, and wouldn’t carry the virus. Tragically, many people that I know still believe that, to the time of this writing, even though the evolving scientific consensus has known that is not the case for a long time now.
So it seems that it would be appropriate, and highly imperative, to correct the record from the failed hypothesis. Vaccinated people that are in good faith operating under the false premise of full protection are spreading that dangerous lie all over Facebook, but they are not being fact-checked, even though it is clearly misinformation at this time. (take, for example the blatant lies about Ivermectin that MSM (mainstream media) fans were bombarded with, calling it “Horse Paste”. Salon, Rolling Stone, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, all ran with a blatant and easily debunked lie {calling Ivermectin a ‘horse dewormer’ is like calling penicillin a ‘pig antibiotic’} that spawned a wave of memes gleefully passed around by the political left. See my last article Are You A Shitlib?) These dangerous reality tunnels are metastasizing out of confusing and contradictory narratives from institutions that have been compromised by political partisanship and corporate conflicts of interest.
The next part of the Reuters fact-check article :
”Some on social media have suggested that the merged clips are proof that the CDC has been dishonest about vaccine efficacy. One individual who shared the clip via Twitter said: “The CDC keep changing their narrative to suit. It’s beyond ridiculous now and utterly irresponsible & unethical. They dig their own holes now! They can’t sustain the lie.”
The “one individual” Reuters chose to represent people sharing Walensky’s comments doesn’t seem to understand that the science around this particular coronavirus is always changing as we learn more. This individual seems to have a bias that assumes the CDC is lying, on purpose with an intent to deceive. Quoting that one individual, instead of any of the thousands of thoughtful and concerned citizens sharing this video, is what classic journalists call “spin”. To the trusting or undiscerning mind, the “independent” fact checker is casting all critical perspectives as angry, illogical conspiracy theories coming from people who don’t understand that science is a question, that science changes.
It’s true, the CDC and the NIH have done an abysmal job over the last 2 years of correcting the record when new information arises, often not announcing policy changes until public awareness of evolving science has already reached critical mass. We should be hearing about the evolving understandings of Sars-Cov-2 and potential treatments from our health leaders first, especially in a time of crisis. Fauci himself admitted to lying about NIH recommendations for policy reasons, not reasons of medical science. The damage to the credibility of these institutions from something like that cannot be overstated. Many people protest that Fauci only lied about the new mask recommendations so that “stupid people” wouldn’t go out and buy up all the masks, leaving healthcare workers in the lurch. Even if you continue to trust Fauci, you should at that point take everything he says with a grain of salt and investigate for yourself: he may be lying yet again to save you from “stupid people.”
Let’s go further:
“The issue is that COVID-19 is not the same disease as it was 6 months ago. The delta variant is more contagious and requires higher levels of antibodies for killing it. Therefore, these videos tell only half the story,” Dr Buddy Creech, Associate Professor of Pediatrics Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, told Reuters via email when presented with the claims.
Those are impressive credentials, and his claim is worth comparing to the data. Delta-variant-specific data, including accurate vaccination status, is challenging to find, and makes it difficult to prove or disprove this claim.
Further down the fact-checking article gets close to the mark, but still shy of the main point of the video they are claiming to check.
“Speaking at the August 18 press briefing, Walensky said that although vaccines are currently working well to prevent hospitalizations, there is “concerning evidence” of “waning vaccine effectiveness over time and against the Delta variant,” and confirmed that booster vaccines will be rolled out to Americans next month.”
Okay, again, a claim that must be backed up by looking at the data. What were hospitalization rates in August, compared to say, January or March? Were we seeing fewer hospitalizations in communities with high vaccination rates? How many of those hospitalizations were correctly notated as “vaccinated hospitalizations” vs “unvaccinated hospitalizations”?
Reuters has still neglected to address the most concerning line in the video:
“reports suggest… severe risk of increased disease amongst those vaccinated early.”
What does that mean? This was not contextualized by the fact-checkers. The Reuters piece addresses that the Delta variant may have voided the original March claims by the CDC that the vaccinated won’t contract or spread the virus (we know now that they do). It’s been known for decades that coronaviruses mutate at astonishing rates, which is why we’ve never had a vaccine for the common cold.
So what is meant by the Director’s statement “severe risk of increased disease amongst those vaccinated early”? Have the vaccines changed, ie, are people now getting vaccinated with a different formula than the earlier formula which can cause severe risk of increased disease? Or is she saying that those vaccinated early will be the first to have severe risk of increased disease, and all that got the (same) vaccine can be expected to follow suit? If the Delta variant is the reason that the vaccine is not as effective as they thought, or hoped, and therefore can, over time, lead to severe risk of disease, why are the health authorities still pushing for everyone to take the same vaccine, even as Sars-Cov-2 continues to mutate? From Wikipedia:
As of July 2021, there are four dominant variants of SARS-CoV-2 spreading among global populations: the Alpha Variant (formerly called the UK Variant and officially referred to as B.1.1.7), first found in London and Kent, the Beta Variant (formerly called the South Africa Variant and officially referred to as B.1.351), the Gamma Variant (formerly called the Brazil Variant and officially referred to as P.1), and the Delta Variant (formerly called the India Variant and officially referred to as B.1.617.2).
The “context” provided in the Reuters piece is full of hopeful rhetoric that the booster, of the very same vaccines, will take up the slack supposedly created by the Delta variant, but… Is that assuming immune escape won’t repeat, putting those with the booster at continued severe risk of increased disease? It’s this kind of madness that make people give up on trying to understand what is going on.
Our government and others are still recommending (actually vehemently pushing) these vaccines as the only way to deal with this virus (oddly ignoring proven cheap and life-saving early treatments), while also saying that those that get the shot are putting themselves, down the line, at severe risk of increased disease. This Reuter’s fact-check article did nothing to dispel that conclusion. That should spark some reasonable doubt in the majority-accepted Covid narrative…. Shouldn’t it?
But if you doubt the official narrative, you risk the ire and scorn of those that believe it, and trying to defend your ability to think critically is to die a slow death of a thousand cuts. The minority that choose to speak out about harm they are noticing from the mainstream narrative are doing so without the muscle and money of the government/media/pharmaceutical complex.
I posted Director Walensky’s video, with commentary critical of the fact-checking article, to my personal Facebook page a few weeks ago, where it was apparently shadow-banned by Facebook. I decided to share that post to the Post-Orthodoxy Facebook page before our Wednesday livestream. I received a warning from Facebook that I had never received before:
Sounds like a mafia threat. “It’d be a shame if the content you worked so hard on disappeared, wouldn’t it?”
I shared the content anyway. Facebook decided to only share my commentary, and omitted the video entirely. Of course there was zero action on the post.
During our livestream, a friend of the show shared a message that Facebook sent her when she tried to share our livestream:
She added her commentary: “Are you sure you want to form your own opinion about vaccines, or would you like to be told?”
Final thought.
Context is indeed important. We share the sources of our data as we research, and when possible, alert people to the potential political/financial/etc. motivations behind those sources. I will pose a final question here: how does it make you feel when you consider the implications that the Chairman of the Thompson Reuters Foundation and former CEO of Reuters (the company who “independently fact-checked” this vaccine related video) is now on the “Our People” page of Pfizer?
(EDIT: Thank you Ainsley Sevier for her editorial expertise.)
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