Fact Checking the Fact Checkers
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I usually ignore the fact checkers because the whole fact checking business is a well remunerated farce.
Thousands of greedy nerds with laptops have set up fact-checking sites and obtained huge sums of money from organisations desperate to defend their lies.
Many of the fact checkers get some, most or all of their money from Facebook, Google, YouTube and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
I have never yet seen a fact checker who finds against a government or drug company. They rarely or never check any facts, they rarely if ever check with the people they’re criticising and they often, usually or always know their conclusion before they start. The fact checkers are, like the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media, misinformation specialists – that is to say, they specialise in spreading misinformation.
However, because fact checkers are forcing themselves into the public eye I looked at three who published material about me in the days after my video about heart problems and the jabs (published on BNT on 22nd November 2021 and entitled ‘Finally! Medical Proof the Covid Jab is ‘Murder’).
First, there is a website called Lead Stories which claims to be a Facebook third party fact checking partner and a member of something called the Coronavirus Facts Alliance. Their top two main funding sources for 2020 were Facebook and Google and something called ByteDance. They also receive money from Coronavirus Facts Alliance. They admit, however, that the bulk of their revenue comes from Facebook.
Who are these organisations? Well, the Coronavirus Facts Alliance is run by something which calls itself ‘the international fact checking network’ (IFCN) at the Poynter Institute in the USA and this works through the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership which was made possible by a generous grant from Craig Newmark Philanthropies. Craig Newmark is the bloke who set up Craigslist. This seems to me to be a very pointy pyramid.
ByteDance is a Chinese internet tech company headquartered in Beijing and domiciled in the Cayman Islands. I can tell you no more.
The writer of the piece at Lead Stories was not, as you might hope, a professor of cardiology or even a doctor or even a nurse but a woman called Alexis Tereszcuk who spent over a decade breaking hard news and celebrity scoop with something called radaronline and a magazine called US Weekly. As the entertainment editor she investigated Hollywood stories and conducted interviews with A list celebrities and reality stars. She is apparently known for her work on ‘The Gossip Queens’ and ‘Most Shocking Reality TV Moments’.
Alexis says that the abstract I quoted in my video does not make claims of death from the covid vaccine nor does it assert that covid vaccines should be halted. True. I interpreted and commented on the evidence. That’s what I do and what I’ve been doing for over 50 weary years.
She then goes on to say, referring to the paper I quoted, that ‘their preliminary experiment shows an increase in endothelial inflammatory markers’.
The key word here is experiment.
And the point that she perhaps doesn’t understand – despite that background of interviewing reality TV stars and celebrities – is that when serious problems appear with an experiment you should look seriously and if there is also evidence of deaths then you stop the experiment.
This same woman also previously criticised a video in which I proved conclusively that covid-19 has a mortality rate similar to the flu.
As proof for her assertion she says that the number of who people died in the US from covid-19 was 594,000 as of May 31st 2021 which is almost 10 times as many as died in the 2017-8 flu season.
Now this is utterly bizarre.
First, I suspect, she may have mixed the word ‘from’ with the word ‘with’. Both are four letter words so that’s understandable.
Second she is comparing lemons to sandals. I wrote about UK figures. She’s using US figures.
Third the figure of 594,000, is generally recognised as being a massive exaggeration because of the habit of putting people down as dying from covid when they also had co-morbidities.
Fourth, she is comparing the total from the end of 2019 to the end of May 2021 – that’s nearly 18 months and she’s comparing it with a six month flu season which she selected.
Fifth, why pick the figures for 2017-18?
Maybe Alexis should go back to writing about minor royals and reality television. But maybe Facebook pays better.
Next there is something called Logically which says it is a technology company with one of the world’s largest dedicated fact checking teams. But then, to paraphrase Mandy Rice Davies ‘they would say that wouldn’t they’.
The majority shareholder of Logically is someone called Lyric Jain who is 25-years-old and describes himself as a serial entrepreneur. Logically also secured funding from Massachusetts Institute of Technology through an investment grant which supports student founded businesses.
Mr Jain is the only person with significant control of Logically. He says he used his own boot-strapped savings, whatever that is, private equity money and money from the fairly small family business of Eliza Tinsley which sells fencing, ropes, gate fittings and straps and ties.
Logically is variously said to have 90, 70 or 25 fact checkers and several in house journalists. I couldn’t really confirm any of that. The fact checking team was said to be in India. It’s difficult to find.
Logically describes me as ‘a noted spreader of health misinformation’ – which is about as libellous as you can get, and complains that the abstract which I quoted contains several typographical errors. Wow. If I thought Lyric had enough money to make it worthwhile I’d sue them. I’d win but my fear is that I might end up with a huge legal bill.
Logically complains that the sample size of 566 people in the paper is extremely small. This will come as a big surprise to drug companies. I’ve seen studies published on a hundredth of that. I’ve seen drugs put on the market with no human experimentation at all – just animals.
The report was written by Ernie. No idea of name or qualifications. There is no list of writers or their backgrounds. Ernie might be a giraffe for all I know.
Ernie the fact checker has also written a fact checking report attacking the idea that people wearing face masks breathe in more carbon dioxide.
His or her evidence is that CO2 molecules are much smaller than the holes in masks and so the CO2 goes through easily.
This is a really stupid argument because the mask material is clearly still preventing most of the airflow.
That seems to be it for Ernie.
He doesn’t quote any scientific papers – my book on masks has scores of scientific references he could have looked at. And he doesn’t seem to be aware of the scientific evidence showing that mask wearers end up with high carbon dioxide levels – and low oxygen levels.
The truth, of course, is that masks do more harm than good. Even Dr Fauci and Dr Whitty agreed that the darned things are no more than virtue signalling.
Ernie’s 0 out of 10 attempt at fact checking is merely helping to sustain the government’s lies.
Logically has an office in London at 12 Soho Square which is apparently one of those buildings where you can rent offices by the square foot. I checked out the building but couldn’t find any mention of Logically but I’m sure they are there somewhere.
A third fact checker I saw is called Institute for Strategic Dialogue which has a headline entitled ‘How Facebook’s failure to remove false content allows covid-19 misinformation to spread’.
This report was written by Aoife Gallagher who was a journalist with the online news agency Storyul and has completed an MA in journalism from TU Dublin. TU Dublin is Technological University Dublin. She seems from her posts to have a pro-vaccine outlook but, hey, I could be wrong.
Aoife studied the World Doctors Alliance on Facebook and words like false information appeared. The WDA is an organisation of which I am a member – it is a group of several thousand medical people probably infinitely more qualified than all the world’s fact checkers put together.
WDA apparently has 550,000 followers on Facebook and I’m guessing Aoife thinks this is a bad thing. But if she does have a pro-vaccine outlook perhaps that isn’t the best starting point for an independent fact checker.
Now ISD grew out of the Club of Three and they have a list of funders.
And the top name on the list – which may be alphabetical and probably is – is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
ISD also receive money from Facebook, Google and Microsoft and YouTube, the UK Home Office, the US state department and the United Nations.
Just how you can claim to be an independent fact checker when your income comes from people like that is a mystery to me.
There’s one thing that’s odd.
ISD has a graph of followers of Facebook pages associated with the World Doctors Alliance to show the influence the WDA and its followers have.
And I am number 6 on the list.
Which is odd, and a bit of a mystery to me, because I don’t have a Facebook page. Indeed, I’ve never even been on Facebook (I’m not allowed in through the door). Facebook banned me from joining in the spring of 2020 saying that I was a threat to their community, though just what sort of a threat they considered me to be they didn’t say.
Vernon Coleman’s book Endgame explains how we got here and where Schwab and his chums want to take us. Endgame is available as a laminated hardback, a paperback and an eBook.
