Who Fact Checks the Fact Checkers

Fact Check 2: PolitiFact's Gabriella SETTLES does a bait and switch, and completely ignores an absolutely enormous elephant in the room.

This PolitiFact fact check opens by asserting that when the CDC and FDA opened an investigation using the VSD dataset into whether Pfizer’s bivalent booster caused strokes in certain age groups, that this caused concern in the general public…

…and resulted in misinformation.

Fact Check 2:

PolitiFact’s Gabriella SETTLES fact checks Twitter and Instagram posts

The first example of this so-called misinformation our young and medically unqualified Fact Checker Journalist (FCJ) links to is a tweet by the current Florida Surgeon General Dr Joseph Ladapo MD, PhD - someone who has not only been medically qualified for more than a decade, he was also appointed to a professorship in medicine at the University of Florida. Professor Lapado therefore speaks from a position of both qualification and experience - something our FCJ simply cannot match. Yet she believes, or perhaps PolitiFact believes, that she has greater standing than he has because she is ruling by grand proclamation on the quality and veracity of his qualified medical opinion.

One has to wonder: Was the FCJ’s use Professor Ladapo’s tweet a politically motivated polemic attack? Did she use his tweet because he is a high profile person in hopes that by naming and debunking him this would elevate the status of her fact check? Or, did she use it simply because she couldn’t find literally anyone else talking smack about the booster vaccine and the CDC and FDA’s stroke investigation? We’ll return to these questions later, because I have my own suspicions that inclusion of Professor Ladapo’s tweet in her fact check was part of a much wider orchestrated series of attacks on him simply because he was willing to speak out for the vaccine injured.

The FCJ then, in one sentence, directs us to the text of an instagram post by Ryann McEnany - a former track and field star for the Florida Gators. Ms McEnany tells her followers that: “The CDC is going to investigate the link between the C19 vaccine and strokes.” In response to her own post she then says: “Glad I’m not vaxxed.”

The FCJ is clearly implying that this statement somehow meets the bar to be adjudged as misinformation. Not so… it is clearly a statement of personal position.

Nothing more.

It doesn’t escape me that Ms McEnany may also have been singled out for political reasons - as her sister Kayleigh McEnany was White House press secretary for a period during the presidency of Donald Trump.

The Bait and Switch

The headline of this fact check could mislead the headline-only or time constrained reader by giving the initial impression that it is rebutting a claim of increased stroke risk in relation to the normal covid boosters (which were nothing more than repeat injection with the same pharmaceutical product containing mRNA for the original spike protein). It is only after scrolling past the large image, and in the third line of the text, that we are told that the FCJ’s context is ostensibly the newer bivalent injections – although she does immediately switch back to just using the term ‘boosters’ for the remainder of the article.

The bivalent injections include both lipid nanoparticles (LNP) that incorporate the original covid spike mRNA, as well as LNP containing spike protein for the more recent Omicron variant. For this reason it would not be incorrect to assume that the same side effects and adverse events observed from the original Pfizer Covid-19 vaccines would also be observed for the bivalent boosters. However, the FCJ fails mention this. She treats the bivalent boosters as if they are completely different medications.

Sources

Rather than checking the actual facts and figures for herself, the FCJ quotes numbers third hand - from another journalist from CNBC who was reporting on statistics and details they had received from a CDC spokesperson. She also cites general statistics from the Mayo Clinic’s website (that ischaemic strokes account for 87% of strokes and affect around 800,000 people per year), but fails to relate these two sets of numbers and demonstrate that her thesis that the stroke risk is not increased is supported by them.

Her primary ‘source’ is an unnamed and therefore unverifiable ‘CDC spokesperson’. The CDC actually have a policy and internal training in place for spokespeople (here) that advise against over-reassuring, and in favour of acknowledging uncertainty – which are both the opposite of the cherry-picked quotes used from this CDC spokesperson. It has been suggested that the CDC have lost much credibility during Covid-19 through poorly chosen spokespeople (here).

The FCJ also relies on comments from Dr Daniel Salmon who, although undeclared here, is also a remunerated sitting member of the vaccine advisory board of pharmaceutical giant Merck while also being a Federal Employee of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). To meet the costs of his Covid-19 vaccine-related work, he also acknowledges grants from Merck…

…and Pfizer.

So he’s totally impartial towards Pfizer’s mRNA Covid-19 injections… right?

The FCJ’s final source is an unnamed ‘Pfizer spokesperson’ who robotically denies, of course, any link between the Pfizer product and [insert serious adverse event of the day here].

While offering enthusiastic support for the Pfizer booster, and repeating the mantra at least three times that no link exists between the Pfizer injections and strokes, the fact check article does very little actual fact checking.  

Fact Check 2 - Review

Referenced sources:

Use of a vaccine advisory board member from Merck who also has financial ties to Pfizer, along with unnamed sources from the vaccine manufacturer Pfizer and the CDC creates the implied but false air of credibility. While one lonely academic paper was used to support a single sentence, the remainder of referenced sources were grey literature, including: a third party website, two CDC links, and two mainstream media online newspaper articles. There is no suggestion that sources supporting the claim being fact checked were ever sought. Certainly, none were provided in the article.

Bias:

On the basis that only sources who were in total support of continued use of Covid-19 vaccines were used, including one employed by the vaccine manufacturer – we conclude that the level of media bias in this fact check article is high.  

Fact checking the fact checker:

While more cases of thrombolytic stroke were reported after vaccination with the AstraZeneca/ChAdOx1, there have been many cases reported after administration of Pfizer BioNTech (for example, see: here, here, here and here). Further, a study published in January 2022 found that vaccination with the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine resulted in a higher risk for ischaemic stroke than any other Covid-19 vaccine (here). The authors of that study also concluded a safety signal existed for several neurological serious adverse events that warranted further investigation, including: central venous sinus thrombosis (CVST – a type of haemorrhagic stroke in the brain caused by blood clots); Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS); and ischaemic stroke.

A final factor to consider:

Another CDC/FDA study conducted using the same VSD dataset found a noticable increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis directly linked to the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna). This aligns with academic studies that have also identified temporal links between receiving the Covid-19 injections and new acute cardiac illness (e.g.: here and here). The link between the mRNA injections and cardiac inflammation is sufficiently notorious and accepted that even government websites acknowledge it as a serious adverse event following vaccination.

It should not be surprising that severe and acute myocarditis can lead to stroke.

Because, as Dr Malcolm Kendrick points out in his book The Cloth Thickens, pretty much any cardiovascular disease (CVD) can impact blood flow and result in blood clots or damage to the epithelial layer (inner lining) of arteries.

The same is also true in reverse for patients who have an acute ischaemic stroke. One study found that many acute stroke patients may actually have undetected myocardial or pericardial disease.

So, we have studies from the CDC and medical academics that link the mRNA injections from Pfizer and Moderna with myocarditis and pericarditis, and yes, stroke. This means it is difficult to nigh on impossible for someone, especially an unqualified young journalist, to credibly claim that something we know is causing one, could never be associated with the other.

About the Fact Checker:

Gabriella SETTLES is a recent college graduate employed by Poytner. She received a National Press Foundation fellowship in 2022 called "widening the pipeline". She was a student journalist at Wayne State University in 2015 with a student profile filled with mostly 'political and ideological activism’ style issues. She has around 5 years post education experience in junior journalilsm roles. Her fellowship incorporates remote virtual training and concludes with face to face training later in 2023. Like many of this new breed of fact checkers we see since the huge injections of fact checking cash from Bill Gates, George Soros, the US Government and organisations like FaceBook, Ms Settles is a recent product of the ideology-awashed College scene.