One of the great ironies of the liberal establishment pushing for the censorship of vaccine misinformation or any materials that could otherwise cause skepticism is that they themselves pushed the exact kind of skepticism they now want censored.
That included Joe Biden and Kamala Harris themselves, amid a sea of left-wing political pundits who blasted a vaccine they alleged Trump only rushed to help his reelection odds. PolitiFact’s dimmest alleged “fact checker” Tom Kertscher attempted to play defense for the latter in his latest article, in which he rates the claim that “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris distributed COVID-19 vaccines” as “false.”
He summarizes his “rebuttal” in one sentence: “Video clips appear to show Joe Biden and Kamala Harris raising doubts about COVID-19 vaccines, but they were raising concerns about the rollout by then-President Donald Trump, not the vaccines themselves.”
Hilariously, that premise is refuted by Harris herself, who he quotes in his own article that I suppose he doesn’t expect anyone to actually read. Harris said (and you can see her say it herself in the video below), when asked if she would take the vaccine: “Well, I think that’s going to be an issue for all of us. I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump. And it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he’s talking about. I will not take his word for it. He wants us to inject bleach. I — no, I will not take his word.”
There’s another part of the quote he doesn’t include, where Harris is asked if public health experts and scientists will get the last word on the efficacy of a vaccine, answering “If past is prologue that they will not, they’ll be muzzled, they’ll be suppressed, they will be sidelined,” Harris said. “Because he’s looking at an election coming up in less than 60 days and he’s grasping to get whatever he can to pretend he has been a leader on this issue when he is not.”
So she’s skeptical of taking the vaccine, and Kertscher incredibly manages to interpret this as her having a problem with logistics.
Of course, to understand this illogic one must understand how the Facebook “fact checking” racquet works. Facebook partners with a number of supposedly independent fact checkers, and once they write a “fact check” of any talking point, their article “fact checking” it will be attached to the information it’s supposedly refuting anytime it’s posted on their platform. Additionally, when an article posted to a page gets “fact checked” it throttles the number of people that page reaches for a period of at least a few weeks.
Kertscher isn’t actually attempting to fact check anything (which is refuted by his own quotations of Harris), he’s attempting to throttle the spread of the objective fact that Harris cast doubt on the efficacy of vaccines when she thought it was politically advantageous.
Perhaps once day his “fact checks” will actually be believable, but I’m not counting on it anytime soon.
Matt Palumbo is the author of Dumb and Dumber: How Cuomo and de Blasio Ruined New York, Debunk This: Shattering Liberal Lies, and Spygate
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