Fake News At WND: Coronavirus Edition, Part 14
WorldNetDaily is still trying to mislead people about COVID and its vaccines, from pretending the vaccines have not been federally approved to more discussion of so-called 'mass formation psychosis.'
How has serial COVID misleader WorldNetDaily been misleading about COVID and its vaccines lately? Let’s take a look. Bob Unruh fearmongered in an Aug. 5 article:
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is insisting people take MORE COVID shots this year, despite a long list of serious side effects that include cardiac arrest – or death.
The shots were introduced during the pandemic several years ago that circled the globe and killed millions.
They all were introduced under an “experimental” label as manufacturers wanted to start selling them before the ordinary testing procedures were done.
The medical establishment, including such high-profile personalities like Anthony Fauci, the adviser to Joe Biden on COVID who once insisted that arguing with him was arguing with “the science,” publicly rejected existing treatments that could, and did, help some people, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, because for the experimental products to be used there was a requirement that other treatments not be available.
In fact, the vaccines have received full federal approval — meaning that Unruh is lying by continuing to call them “experimental” — and ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine don’t work against COVID. But rather than tell his readers the truth, Unruh ramped up the fearmongering:
Other potential issues for those taking the shots, according to the NIH, include, “pericarditis, thrombotic events, arrhythmias, hypertension, acute coronary syndrome, cardiac arrest and anemia.”
Myocarditis and pericarditis have appeared to target “males younger than 30” who take the injections, the NIH said.
Further possibilities include inflammation, thrombosis, elevated blood pressure, thrombocytopenia.
There were nearly 30,000 admitted cases of myocarditis, pericarditis, thrombosis, thrombocytopenia, hypertension, arrhythmia and tachycardia, without counting those cases that may have been milder or not accurately diagnosed.
Also, the shots offer a chance of “leukocytoclastic vasculitis, psoriatic arthritis, psoriasis, irritable bowel syndrome, lesions, unilateral dermatome populovesicular herpes zoster, pityriasis rosea, recurrent pruritic maculopapular rash, recurring kidney diseases such as immunoglobulin nephropathy, neutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibodies, vasculitis, acute interstitial nephritis, proteinuria, hypoalbuminemia, hypercholesterolemia, hypertriglyceridemia, and peripheral edema.
There’s even documented a a “substantial link” between COVID-19 shots and “acute disseminated encephalomyelitis,” a “severe autoimmune disease affecting young individuals” that “results in rapid and unexpected degeneration of the protective covering around the nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord.”
Unruh offered no dissenting viewpoint to his bogus fearmongering. He repeated much of this in an Aug. 27 article:
The federal government has withdrawn the “emergency authorization” that allowed the COVID shots to be given to Americans without being fully evaluated and tested.
The Food and Drug Administration said it had approved COVID “boosters,” but canceled the emergency use authorizations.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, confirmed the moves on social media.
[…]
The FDA explained its “Emergency Use Authorization,” used get the COVID shots on the market, allowed the “use of unapproved medical products, or unapproved uses of approved medical products in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions when certain statutory criteria have been met, including that there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.”
In fact, however, previously available medications such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were documented to provide benefits against COVID. The medical deep state, however, constantly belittled them.
Unruh censored the fact that numerous medical studies — not the “medical deep state” — have discredited the idea that those medications work against COVID.
Joe Kovacs served up Trump stenography:
President Donald Trump on Monday demanded drug companies justify the success of COVID shots, saying the Centers For Disease Control is “being ripped apart over this question.”
In a lengthy post on Truth Social, the president stated: “It is very important that the Drug Companies justify the success of their various Covid Drugs. Many people think they are a miracle that saved Millions of lives. Others disagree!
“With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer, and I want it NOW. I have been shown information from Pfizer, and others, that is extraordinary, but they never seem to show those results to the public. Why not???
Kovacs then touted a discredited right-wing fearmongerer to back Trump up:
“This development is a total game changer and is sending shock waves throughout the global establishment,” Alex Jones of Infowars said Monday.
“Trump knows he was set up and knows the truth is coming out so he is getting ahead of it. Mark my words this is over the top good news!”
“The whole thing’s already come down. The whole world is waking up. The majority of people know it’s pure poison. Three percent even take the new, stupid boosters. So Trump understands he was set up.”
“We’ve been all over this,” Jones added. “It’s the shot that kills you, the shot that erases the immune system.”
Kovacs made no effort to offer an opposing view to Trump and Jones.
Unruh used a Sept. 3 article to tout an over-the-counter medication found to have been effective against COVID — but also made sure to parrot his bogus right-wing narratives:
For sure pharmaceutical companies made hundreds of billions of dollars during the COVID pandemic on their experimental shots, mostly mRNA creations that actually were “treatments” more than “vaccines,” and ultimately have proven to carry with them a multitude of side effects, including multiple side effects that are fatal.
But now a newly released study from Germany, a peer-reviewed assessment, has shown that a cheap nasal spray, going for maybe $10 a bottle, used three times a day is mostly effective at stopping the China virus.
The study appeared in the JAMA Internal Medicine publication and was cited in a report in the Gateway Pundit.
Of course Unruh cites the highly discredited Gateway Pundit. Why wouldn’t he? He seems oblivious to the fact that relying on a discredited source also discredits him and his employer as well. Also, COVID is not called the “China virus” by any medical professional, and he didn’t explain why he insisted on using that questionable term.
More misinfo
WorldNetDaily’s serial misinformation campaign about COVID and its vaccines continued in a Sept. 23 article by Unruh:
Google has confirmed in a letter to Congress that Joe Biden demanded censorship of COVID and elections information on YouTube that conflicted with his ideological agenda at the time.
“It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden administration, attempts to dictate how the company moderates content, and the company has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds,” Google’s lawyer said in a letter to Congress.
The letter was the result of oversight work by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
[…]
The fights over speech triggered by Biden’s censorship agendas included his attempt to suppress many true statement statements about COVID, that it came out of Chinese lab experimenting on how to make bat viruses more dangerous, and that he demanded Americans take the experimental shots for the virus.
Those shots since have proven to be capable of causing serious injury to recipients, including death.
In fact, neither of Unruh’s claims have been proven to be definitively true. It has not been proven that the virus came from a Chinese lab leak — and there is much evidence to argue that the virus surfaced naturally — and COVID vaccines, which are not “experimental,” are safer than catching COVID itself. Unurh then peddled an old lie:
He also demanded suppression of comments about the failures of the American election system in the 2020 presidential vote that gave him the White House. Since then the public has learned that there were two major outside and undue influences on that election, one being the handout by Mark Zuckerberg of some $400 million to local election officials who often used it to recruit Democrat votes. Never before in American elections had such an amount of private money been used to influence the vote.
As we’ve documented, Unruh is lying — he has never offered evidence that any Zuckerberg money went specifically to target Democrats, and he did not explain why encouraging people to vote is such a horrible thing.
An anonymously written Oct. 7 article hyped a dubious study:
A new study from South Korea has documented how COVID shots and their boosters, mandated by corporations, military commanders, federal officials and more during the pandemic created by the China virus, push up the risk of cancers.
A report at Childrens Health Defense cites the study by South Koreans published in Biomarker Research, a Springer Nature journal.
The study included more than eight million people and found COVID-19 shots and boosters “are associated with a higher risk of breast, colorectal, gastric, lung, prostate and thyroid cancer, across all vaccine types and age groups.”
Not true, as a more credible report noted:
In fact, the study’s findings do not support these claims. The authors observed that vaccinated people were more likely to be diagnosed with certain cancers within a year of vaccination, but noted that the timeline was “relatively short for evaluating cancer incidence.”
Experts and social media users pointed out that vaccinated groups are typically older and more likely to have health conditions that increase cancer risk, which likely explains the observed association.. The study authors also acknowledged potential “reverse causation or surveillance bias,” meaning that increased medical attention after vaccination could have led to more cancer detections.
The article went on to huff that “‘Mainstream medical commentators’ claimed the findings are ‘flawed. But others found value in the results.” WND buried those flaws, and it continued to promote anti-vaxxer narratives:
Critics charged the study failed to account for family histories of cancer, and screening histories.
But Children’s Health Defense research scientist Karl Jablonowski explained, “The criticism levied against the study is of healthy user bias. The idea that people more likely to engage in one medical intervention (vaccination) are also more likely to engage in another (cancer screening) … is a valid concern for a vaxed-unvaxed study such as this one, as those seeking a vaccine will have drastically different healthcare-seeking behavior than those not seeking a vaccine.
“[However,] this is not just a vaxed-unvaxed study — it also differentiates the vaccines. Healthy user bias is not a point of argument for why one vaccine (cDNA) shows a strong cancer risk above another (mRNA). Further, the study doesn’t say vaccines cause cancer, but are associated with them.”
WND failed to disclose that Children’s Health Defense is an anti-vaxxer group with a certain bias.
WND also posted a Sept. 8 podcast from Tucker Carlson in which he tried to portray Kirk Moore — a doctor who committed crimes by destroying COVID vaccines, selling falsified vaccination cards and injecting saline into children pretending it was a COVID vaccine — into some kind of sick anti-vaxxer hero.
Misinformer on podcast
A Feb. 12 promo for Elizabeth Farah’s podcast states:
Public trust in medicine is collapsing, and what happens next will shape the health of an entire generation. In this urgent conversation, Elizabeth Farah sits down with Dr. Peter McCullough to examine why confidence in doctors, vaccines, and public health institutions has fractured so dramatically in recent years.
McCullough argues that today’s controversies did not begin with COVID. He traces a recurring pattern in American medicine, from the cocaine era to the decades-long defense of cigarette smoking, and now to what he calls modern “vaccine mania.” In each case, he contends, doctors embraced prevailing consensus, dismissed dissent, and failed to correct course until outside pressure forced change.
The discussion turns to the rapid expansion of the childhood vaccine schedule, the 1986 liability shield for manufacturers, and the COVID vaccine rollout. McCullough maintains that once physicians became participants in the policies they were promoting, objectivity eroded. His central question is whether the medical establishment can reform itself, or whether transparency and open debate must be imposed from outside the system.
We haven’t listened to the podcast, but somehow, we’re pretty sure that Farah never asked McCullough about his wildly false statements and other misinformation about COVID and its vaccines — most notoriously, his claim that the Delta variant was “the mildest one we’ve seen so far” when, in fact, it was much more contagious than the original strain.
The article went on to declare:
This interview matters now because new federal leadership has promised reform, yet trust remains deeply fractured. The future of public health may depend on whether accountability and open scientific review finally replace institutional defensiveness.
True, but given that McCullough was one of the people who broke that trust by spreading COVID misinformation, it’s unlikely that he would care that this trust could be restored. We’re guessing Farah never held him accountable for his misinformation and the resultant lack of trust that he helped to foster.
‘Mass formation psychosis’ returns
Hanne Nabintu Herland began her March 19 WorldNetDaily column by rehashing some of her pet COVID conspiracy theories:
COVID-19 has been called the largest, most sophisticated propaganda operation in history. The media narrative was quickly set and from every angle we heard about the only solution to COVID-19: Get vaccinated and stay isolated with masks on. In a recent conversation with Joe Rogan, Dr. Robert Malone, virologist, immunologist and an original inventor of mRNA vaccination, discussed his experiences surrounding COVID-19 and psychological manipulation. For example, why were good treatments suppressed on the internet while we only heard about vaccines?
Leading immunologists, biologists and experts within the field were simply not listened to. In an interview with Germany’s forefront virus expert in microbiology, Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi pointed out that Western government shutdowns were a completely wrong and extremely dangerous response. He said that self-isolating the whole population was grotesque, absurd and very dangerous: “This is the incredible tragedy, because all these adopted measures are actually senseless and meaningless. The life expectancy of millions is now being shortened because of this with horrifying impact on the world economy.”
Herland didn’t disclose the fact that Bhakdi is a COVID conspiracy theorist who has made anti-Semitic remarks. Instead, she engages in more conspiracy theories:
“Psychological techniques were extensively used during 2020 to incite fear and panic in the population, while other persuasion strategies were used to get people to support and defend COVID measures such as masking, isolation, social distancing, lockdowns and jab mandates,” writes Dr. Joseph Mercola, osteopathic physician and best-selling author. For example, the Imperial College Report, which showed that millions would die, later turned out to be fraudulent, not even peer reviewed. Its author, Neil Ferguson, notorious for overestimating numbers, both during Ebola and the Swine flu, was sacked from his job. The same scientist had estimated that 150,000 would die in the U.K. during the Foot and Clove flu. Two hundred died.
Something happens when a uniform consensus emerges, and every news outlet, every report on social media and every colleague or friend have the same opinion about the topic. Factual information matter less, as fear grips the person who is overwhelmed from every angle by one particular narrative. The element of social fear becomes so pervasive that the individual ends up following the crowd, even if the narrative clearly is irrational. In fact, the individual feels that he is the irrational party if he questions the official narrative. His perspective remains unaltered even if new data emerges that proves the media narrative wrong. This phenomenon can be attributed to the concept of mass formation. As a consequence of social reinforcement, rational independent evaluation is stopped as the individual perceives independence as a social risk.
“Modern information algorithms strongly influence which medical ideas you see, shaping how you interpret health risks and treatment options. During the first months of COVID-19, physicians around the world were testing combinations of existing, inexpensive medications. Some of those strategies showed early promise. Yet, most people never heard about them – not because the science was settled against them, but because of where and when the research happened, who funded it and how information platforms decided what you’d see,” writes Mercola. For example, the FDA and CDC enabled vaccines that guaranteed profits for manufacturers, at the expense of full safety transparency.
Mercola is a quack with a history of making false and even illegal claims and pushing drugs of questionable value, but Herland won’t tell you that fact — she’s fully taken in by another conspiracy theory:
Malone highlights the concept of mass formation psychosis, a psychological phenomenon where socially isolated populations become highly susceptible to manipulation by authoritative leaders. He argues that governments deployed psychological warfare and algorithmic censorship during COVID-19 to control public opinion. These mechanisms created a propaganda ecosystem that suppressed dissenting scientific views and treatments like ivermectin, influenced by corporate interests.
The phenomenon of mass formation can be defined as the process where a large number of people adopt a similar narrative due to a dominating sense of anxiety and isolation, rather than being driven by the strongest evidence. This shared narrative is not driven by rational thinking, but from fear of losing the sense of belonging to a “safe group.”
Herland doesn’t seem to consider the fact that she’s a victim of mass formation psychosis — like other COVID onspiracy theorists — by buying into the conspiracy theories of Malone, Mercola and others. Still, she perpetuates her narrative by concluding:
So, while classical argumentation is based on discussions where logic and rationality wins, propaganda enforces the desired narrative through pure fear. Propaganda is defined as information of a biased or misleading nature in the effort to promote a particular narrative.
Again, Herland fails to consider the fact that she’s a propagandist.
Mercola? In 2026? I thought that he died out some time in the late 2000s. Guess I was wrong.
Also, sorry if this sounds weird, but do you read comments? Also, having 2 conwebwatch blogs confuses me.