Fake News At WND: Coronavirus Edition, Part 11
WorldNetDaily keeps touting COVID misinformers, quacks and discredited researchers -- and whining that shoddy anti-vaxx studies have been retracted.
(Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10)
Even though the COVID pandemic has largely passed, WorldNetDaily still insists on publishing fake news about the virus and its vaccines. One of WND’s resident COVID misinformers, Art Moore, struck again in a Jan. 18 article:
An MIT scientist is warning of possible long-term damage to the brain from COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, saying it’s likely there will be an “alarming” rise in several major neurodegenerative diseases.
And that’s likely to happen increasingly among the younger population, according to Stephanie Seneff in an academic paper titled “Worse Than the Disease? Reviewing Some Possible Unintended Consequences of the mRNA Vaccines Against COVID-19” published in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research.
Seneff, a senior research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Monday night it’s “outrageous to be giving vaccines to young people because they have … a very, very low risk of dying from COVID.”
“So, they don’t get a benefit,” she said. “And when you look at the potential harm from these vaccines, it just doesn’t make any sense.”
And repeated boosters, Seneff added, will be “very devastating in the long term.”
The MIT scientist said she has done a lot of research on the subject and is “beginning to understand how the process takes place.”
Well, not so much — she has no demonstrated expertise in medical issues. Moore hinted at it when he called her a “senior research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory”; in fact, her doctorate is in electrical engineering and computer science — not in anything medical.
Before becoming an anti-vaxxer, Seneff’s claim to medical infamy — again, she has no formal medical training — was devising a claim that autism is caused by exposure to the weed killer glyphosphate, a claim that has been embraced by quack doctor Joseph Mercola.
Meanwhile, the Genetic Literacy Project reported that Seneff’s dubious COVID vaccine claims have gotten the attention of anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr. — again, not the kind of company credible people keep. Further, despite Moore’s portrayal of the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research — the journal that published Seneff’s paper — as “peer-reviewed,” the Genetic Literacy Project noted that nobody outside the fringe-wacko community treats it as a credible publication. (One scientist observed that publishing something there “seems to be no different than self-publishing a book on Amazon Kindle.”) Further, Seneff is actually a member of the journal’s editorial staff, which also raises credibility and independence questions.
(There’s another familiar name on that editor list: Russell Blaylock, who has spent years peddling anti-vaxxer claims at Newsmax.)
Moore’s insistence on promoting the dubious claims of discredited people doesn’t make anyone want to take either him or WND seriously as a credible source of news.
A Feb. 20 article by Bob Unruh was filled with misleading claims:
A new study has tied the shots that were developed, almost overnight, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic that apparently came out of a Chinese lab researching how to make bat viruses more threatening to multiple major complications.
Including heart and brain ailments.
A report at the IBTimes said the research was done by the Global Vaccine Data Network in New Zealand and documented the outcomes for 99 million people who were given the shots.
Already, there have been previous studies tying the shots to various complicated and serious medical side effects including blood clots and myocarditis, an ailment of the heart muscle.
Now the new study has confirmed that “the shots from pharma giants including Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca have been associated with rare occurrences of heart, brain, and blood disorders.”
[…]
Found in increased numbers were cases of myocarditis, which includes an inflammation of the heart muscle, after doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s and Moderna’s mRNA shots.
What Unruh refused to tell his readers: The risk is only slightly higher than normal, and the side effects remain rare. As one doctor commented:
Dr. Jacob Glanville, CEO of Centivax, a San Francisco biotechnology company, also reacted to the study’s findings.
“This study is confirming in a much larger cohort what has been previously identified in the original studies during the pandemic — myocarditis and pericarditis as a rare side effect of mRNA vaccines and clots as a rare side effect of the viral vectored vaccines,” he told Fox News Digital.
“The odds of all of these adverse events are still much, much higher when infected with SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), so getting vaccinated is still by far the safer choice.”
Another doctor reiterated that point:
But Dr. David Goodfriend, director of the Loudoun County Health Department, said while all vaccines come with some risk of adverse reaction, in this case, all of the increases may not be because of the vaccinations.
“COVID itself can cause the same infection,” said Goodfriend. “It’s hard to know if it’s the vaccine that’s resulting in an increased level of this, or it was just that we were having COVID.”
Goodfriend said studies have also consistently shown the benefits of the COVID vaccines are higher than the potential risks.
Because Unruh is a stenographer and not a reporter, he’s content to regurgitate claims from highly biased anti-vaxxer websites rather than do the actual journalistic work of gathering all relevant information and tell readers the truth instead of his employer’s dishonest narrative.
Gateway Pundit conspiracy theory
WND took a break from republishing stuff from the discredited Gateway Pundit to whitewash Capitol rioters in order to republish a Gateway Pundit article that pushes dubious COVID vaccine conspiracies in a Feb. 20 piece by Jim Hoft:
Richard Hirschman, a funeral director and embalmer from Alabama, went viral after releasing a disturbing video on his social media account on Sunday, which has since amassed over 15 million views.
Hirschman had a role in the hit documentary “Died Suddenly,” which was released in late 2022 and has garnered almost 19 million views. It is a fascinating account of anomalies found in deceased humans since the roll-out of these experimental vaccines and more.
The video features Hirschman removing what he describes as “strange white fibrous clots” from the right jugular vein of a deceased individual. Nicky King, who is also an embalmer, was recording the procedure.
Hirschman, who has more than two decades of experience in embalming, expressed his disbelief and concern in the video’s caption.
“This is a video of me removing one of the strange white fibrous clots, from the right jugular vein. The person who was recording it is Nicky King, who is also an embalmer. I didn’t notice it until I lifted the vessel up. I could feel it inside the vein. I only show this because people still don’t believe it and ask for video evidence. What’s causing this? I can’t say for sure, but I didn’t start seeing this until early 2021. Unfortunately, I still find strange clotting in several bodies that I embalm,” he wrote.
In fact, “Died Suddenly,” made by anti-Semitic white supremacist Stew Peters, is filled with lies and unsupported claims — and that’s also true of Hirschman’s claims, which were first promoted at WND in 2022 (which ConWebWatch has also pointed out). Health Feedback reported that the lab Hirschman used to support his claims is run by anti-vaxxer Mike Adams, so that’s a red flag right there. Further, despite Hirschman’s assertions, blood clots in the deceased are common:
Hirschman told the Epoch Times that 50 to 70% of the bodies he saw had white, long, fibrous “structures” that he had never seen before, which he “suspected” were caused by COVID-19 vaccines. However, there is no evidence other than Hirschman’s assertions to support such an association. Furthermore, the vaccination status “isn’t on the death certificate”, as Hari P. Close, national president of the National Funeral Directors & Morticians Association, explained to PolitiFact. Therefore, Hirschman’s observations alone don’t demonstrate that such clots appear predominantly in vaccinated people.
Irene Sansano, an anatomical pathology specialist at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona, Spain, said in an email to Health Feedback that the clots found by Hirschman “don’t look different” from the ones they regularly find in blood clot autopsies at the hospital. She also explained that thromboembolisms (circulating blood clots) are frequent among deceased people and are mainly caused by “obesity, sedentarism, smoking, and now COVID-19”.
PolitiFact also pointed out at the time that Hirschman’s claims are anecdotal, not documented through scientific evidence, and that embalmers typically do not know the vaccination status of those they are embalming — and that such clots have also been found in those who died of COVID.
Hoft went on to cite a study published in “the open access peer-reviewed journal, International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research” claiming to reach similar conclusions — but as noted above, that journal is a hotbed of anti-vaxxers, so there’s no reason to trust anything in it.
With both WND and the Gateway Pundit, narrative — however false — is more important than truth. That’s why Gateway Pundit recently filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to shield itself from facing the consequences of spreading lies about election fraud.
Retracted study
When a study attacking COVID vaccines — written by credibility-challenged anti-vaxxers like Peter McCullough and Steve Kirsch — somehow survived peer review and was published in an actual medical journal, WorldNetDaily was quite excited about the development, even as fact-checkers found issues in the paper’s research. A few weeks after publication, however, the journal retracted the study, noting that “concerns were raised regarding a number of claims made in this article” as well as “the validity of some of the cited references that support the conclusions and a misrepresentation of the cited references and available data.” WND unsurprisingly didn’t want to talk too much about this. Instead, it offloaded coverage of it to something called the Defender, in a partial article (which WND does when stealing the content of others) it republished on Feb. 29:
The journal Cureus on Monday retracted the first peer-reviewed paper to provide an extensive analysis of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine trial data and post-injection injuries. The authors of the paper also called for a global moratorium on the vaccines.
Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the paper’s authors, called the retraction “a stunning act of scientific censorship.” He told The Defender: “The journal and its editors had the right to reject the paper at any time during the review process. Once published, it is a violation of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Guidelines to retract a paper without adequate justification.”
The paper, published last month, detailed the vaccines’ potential serious harms to humans, vaccine control and processing issues, the mechanisms behind adverse events, the immunological reasons for vaccine inefficacy and the mortality data from the registrational trials.
The full Defender article features much more whining from McCullough and crew about how his shoddy research was exposed. WND didn’t disclose, however, that the Defender is a publication of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaxxer group founded by Robert Kennedy Jr., whose current presidential campaign WND loved as a Democratic spoiler until souring on him when he started running as an independent who might take votes form Donald Trump.
WND hasn’t published anything else on the retracted study since then, so maybe it’s not as interested as it used to be in sticking its neck out for discredited anti-vaxxers.
Touting a quack
Unruh wrote in an April 30 article:
A new report is citing a Canadian government database showing an explosion of reproductive ailments as evidence of problems with side effects from the mRNA treatments mandated by governments and businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It is past time for the Canadian medical and government establishment, along with mainstream medical professionals and legacy media, to stop gaslighting suffering patients. It is time for them to explore the dramatic evidence of the relationship between COVID vaccination rollout and the reproductive damage that tens of if not thousands of patients suffered,” explained a substack report at BehindTheFDACurtain.
The report documented that according to the database, “the average number of patients assigned the following reproduction-related diagnostic codes increased, on average, in every category for 2021 to 2022 over 2015 to 2019.
“This means that Canadian medical professionals found more Ontarians suffering from the following conditions after over eighty-five percent of the population had taken COVID vaccines.”
The report said up significantly was “Infertility in both men and women,” as well as low sperm count and absence of sperm in semen in men.” Also, “Inflamed fallopian tubes and ovaries,” as well as pelvic inflammatory disease, which can lead to ectopic pregnancy, infertility, chronic pelvic pain, and other related complications.
And “menopausal and post-menopausal bleeding” as well as “disorders of menstruation.”
And, “miscarriages including missed abortions, incomplete abortions, and complete abortions.”
Needless to say, Unruh couldn’t be bothered to fact-check the report or seek out an alternative — he’s a stenographer, not a reporter. But fact-checks of similar claims found that there’s no evidence COVID vaccines played a role in fertility rate declines in Canada. Further, the alleged study that produced those results was co-writtten by Naomi Wolf, a notorious misinformer who has made similar discredited claims about COVID vaccines affecting reproduction.
Of course, if Unruh had uncovered that information, he wouldn’t have a story, and WND doesn’t care about being truthful.
The same day, Unruh cranked out another bit of stenographic COVID misinformation:
Dr. Joseph Mercola, an expert on natural health remedies and avowed critic of the government-mandated COVID shots that were imposed on the American public during the pandemic, now is warning about the evidence of a link between those mRNA shots and dementia.
At his Mercola.com website, he discusses his research and research by others into the links, often devastating, that are being confirmed between the COVID shots that so many governments and corporations demanded citizens take, and some very bad health outcomes.
Among those is dementia, and related mental issues.
“According to mounting data, one of the more serious side effects of the COVID mRNA jabs appears to be dementia, and worse yet, this previously untransmissible disease may now be ‘contagious,’ transmissible by way of prions,” he warned.
Associating prion-related diseases to vaccines has long been an anti-vaxxer trope, and all Mercola is doing here is applying the conspiracy to COVID vaccines. Meanwhile, Unruh seems to be somewhat aware of Mercola’s reputation as a COVID misinformer and overall quack doctor — WND has previously complained when his quackery resulted in consequences — because he went the appeal-to-authority route by reciting his claimed resume:
Mercola’s life work had included his wellness clinic in Illinois, through which he began exploring the world of natural medicine.
He’s worked with patients on ailments including rheumatoid arthritis, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, allergies, autism and ADD.
The medical industry pays him a perhaps back-handed compliment when it accuses him of spreading “disinformation” during the COVID pandemic because he expressed doubts about the mRNA treatments that were in some situations forced on unwilling recipients and his advocacy for alternative treatments.
Of course, many of those alternatives, condemned by the pharmaceutical-industrial complex during the pandemic, now are known to provide benefits.
Of course, Unruh made absolutely no effort to talk to anyone other than Mercola, and he refused to tell readers about Mercola’s history of quackery.
WND promoted Unruh’s article on its front page with a picture of President Biden, as if to claim without evidence that his purported signs of “cognitive decline” were caused by the vaccine. Another bit of dishonest journalism that discredits WND.
Despite all this factually challenged scaremongering, WND did also run an article in March (which it stole from the UK Independent) about a man who received 217 COVID vaccines with no apparent ill effect — which makes WND’s scaremongering look even more dishonest.
A new COVID misinformer
Unruh found yet another highly dubious COVID misinformer to promote in a May 22 article:
When the pharmaceutical industry, with the U.S. government promising a payday windfall, assembled those mRNA COVID shots, there was scant information about the negative impacts they could have.
They were unleashed on an unsuspecting public with the “experimental” label as both governments and corporations made them mandatory.
Since then, multiple reports and studies have confirmed the deadly side effects they delivered to victims, up to and including fatal heart ailments.
Now one expert assessment of those medical schemes has gone farther in its criticism: a top cancer expert from Japan is calling them “essentially murder.”
The report is from Daily News from the Art of Liberty on Substack.
[…]
It explains Dr. Masanori Fukushima was citing “turbo cancers” that move very fast and often are in Stage Four, a terminal point, “by the time they are diagnosed.”
He said the toll is much worse than what could be explained by the fact so many people were locked down and failed to have regular health evaluations, thereby missing early cancer warning signs.
Yes, some random anonymous guy’s Substack is treated as an authoritative source. And it turns out that Fukushima is actually kind of a crazy person, a once-respected researcher who went off the COVID conspiracy deep end. A former vaccine official in Japan described him as an “anti-vaccine demagogue,” and the university where he used to teach distanced itself from him, stating that “The institution doesn’t take responsibility for faculty members and their comments post-retirement.” And last month, a study co-authored by Fukushima claiming to link mRNA COVID vaccines to increased cancer rates was retracted because the data cited did not support the claimed results.
Still, Unruh went on to hype:
He shared one story of a man, 28, found dead by his wife, just five days after taking the second mRNA shot from Pfizer.
“The doctor who did the autopsy said that when he tried to remove the heart, it was soft and had disintegrated,” Fukushima said. “And even just one case like this shows how dangerous this vaccine can be.”
No documentation is offered for this claim by either Unruh or the Substack writer. And because Unruh was too lazy to do anything other than rewrite that Substack article, his readers don’t know what a dangerous flake Fukushima is.