Notice the crap sources that anti-vax Covid-denying clowns get their fabricated nonsense from... LifeSiteNews – Bias and Credibility https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/life-site-news/ QUESTIONABLE SOURCE A questionable source exhibits one or more of the following: extreme bias, consistent promotion of propaganda/conspiracies, poor or no sourcing to credible information, a complete lack of transparency, and/or is fake news. Fake News is the deliberate attempt to publish hoaxes and/or disinformation for profit or influence (Learn More). Sources listed in the Questionable Category may be very untrustworthy and should be fact-checked on a per-article basis. Please note sources on this list are not considered fake news unless specifically written in the reasoning section for that source. See all Questionable sources. We rate LifeSiteNews far-right biased for story selection that always favors evangelical Christianity and Questionable based on the promotion of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and many failed fact checks.
RFK Jr. is a clown. Fact check: RFK Jr. claimed he’s never told people to avoid vaccination. He did – less than two years ago https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/21/politics/fact-check-rfk-not-anti-vax/index.html
I saw the Podcast when he made public his anti-vaccination stance along with implying he will do whatever it takes to discourage people from getting vaccinated involving our right as "...civil disobedience...". He specifically stated the following involving telling people to not get vaccinated: “Every one of us has an obligation to do a civil disobedience every day...". He didn't stop there. He was on a Joe Rogan podcast...they both challenged Dr. Peter Hotez to a debate about vaccines. A few years later as in today. Now he's pretending he didn't say anything as if he's trying to weasel out of something that many voters are going to hold him accountable. Seriously, I thought the guy was going to begin crying about "censorship". Yet, I think he forgot that he has his own website (a few of them) and Twitter (now under the management of Elon Musk) where he can exercise his free speech...no censorship. Actually, he has been exercising his free speech all over social media including in Podcasts of other celebrities without any censorship. Regardless, he's much more active in his stance against another vaccine that he believes causes autism. Seriously, he literally single-handed killed many fundraisers for the MMR vaccine that prevents measles, mumps and rubella (MMR). Today, fewer people are getting vaccinated and the rate of Autism is creeping upward. Oddly, others state that the reason why Autism is increasing can not be correlated to a decline in MMR vaccination. Instead, it's because more people have a growing awareness of autism spectrum disorder and a focus on getting more children into treatment. Other factors including air pollution, low birth weight, and stress may also be behind the increase in diagnoses. As vaccination rates decline... Autism cost the U.S. economy about $268 billion in 2015 and could increase to $461 billion by 2025 on only a 3% drop in the vaccination rate. Thank you RFK Jr and other anti-vaxxers. Now imagine when the decline in vaccines reaches 10%. Strangely, they do not cite the same above reasons. Instead, they blame vaccines in communities with high vaccination and in communities with low vaccination rates while there's more extreme heat (studies have linked extreme heat to impaired fetal growth) for pregnant women, air pollution, low birth weight, and higher stress rates. wrbtrader
Let's check the latest batshiat insane crap coming from the anti-vax crowd. News: tornado causes massive damage at Pfizer plant. Not news: antivaxholes cheer. New Idiocy Level: antifvaxholes claim tornado was "orchestrated via weather manipulation" to earn Pfizer a big insurance payout Fact check: Theory suggests NC tornado was created for Pfizer to claim insurance money A tornado damaged a Pfizer pharmaceutical plant in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, on July 19, leading to some virtual cheers from vaccine skeptics and unfounded conspiracy theories from social media users. https://www.wral.com/story/fact-che...for-pfizer-to-claim-insurance-money/20965574/
Let's take a deeper look at the institute which was formed and funded strictly with the sole purpose of pushing anti-vax Covid-denier nonsense. Who is Funding the Brownstone Institute? New tax filings provide some clarity about the funders of the prolific COVID-19 conspiracy outfit. https://www.importantcontext.news/p/who-is-funding-the-brownstone-institute A shadowy dark money group that has been waging information warfare on public health efforts to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic took big money from nonprofit foundations and funds in 2021, tax records reveal. Since its establishment in May 2021, the Brownstone Institute has become a prolific and central hub of COVID-related misinformation and conspiracy thinking. Brownstone authors, who include prominent public health contrarians and conspiracy theorists, and COVID minimizers, downplay the seriousness of the virus while hyping up concerns about the supposed harms of mitigation measures. The group has also encouraged anti-vaccine sentiment, platforming prominent vaccine skeptics and misinformation spreaders like Dr. Robert Malone and Naomi Wolf. Brownstone has worked to give an academic veneer to its agenda, which is ultimately supported by business interests. For example, in May 2022, Brownstone organized the so-called Norfolk Group, a motley crew of contrarian doctors that released an outline for a congressional inquiry into the federal COVID response in early February. That outline echoed the “Roadmap for COVID-19 Congressional Oversight” report released weeks earlier by influential Washington D.C.-based conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, which receives funding from a number of right-wing billionaires. Brownstone is the continuation of the work of one man: Jeffrey Tucker, an advocate for child labor and tobacco use. Tucker started the institute after helping to organize the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, a widely-rebuked but official-sounding open letter from October 2020 that called on governments and scientists to reject broad public health measures in favor of allowing mass infection to deliver herd immunity. The document was written and signed at a conference hosted by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), the libertarian think tank at which Tucker worked. Brownstone initially purported to be the declaration’s “spiritual child.” Important Context has reported extensively on Brownstone and its mysterious funding. In January, we revealed that 83 percent of the group’s $1.2 million total revenue for 2021—and 85 percent of its $1 million fundraising haul—had come from just nine large anonymous contributions ranging up to $600,000. At the time, however, we were unable to identify the donors. Now, with more tax filings released, we are able to put organization names to over $250,000 of the nonprofit’s funding. That money represents four of the nine large contributions. The funders were identified with help from David Armiak of the Center for Media And Democracy, who helped with our previous report. Big Money The donations to Brownstone we were able to identify came through donor-advised funds—passthrough organizations that manage charitable contributions for clients—and private foundations. How donor-advised funds work: A client will open an account with the fund, depositing money and transferring legal control to the fund managers, who then dispense the cash to charitable causes with input from the client. There are several key benefits of using these funds, but the main draw for political donors is anonymity. Donations appear under the name of the fund itself rather than the client, enabling secretive giving. The largest donation to the COVID misinformation dark money operation with a source we were able to identify was $100,000 from the Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust, a donor-advised fund affiliated with banking giant Morgan Stanley. Brownstone also received $50,000 from the Bluebell Foundation, a Florida-based nonprofit that has funded a number of charitable causes from universities to public broadcasting. In addition to Brownstone, the foundation funded another group with a particular focus on COVID: U.S. Right To Know, which describes itself as “a nonprofit investigative public health research and journalism group working globally to expose corporate wrongdoing and government failures that threaten our health, environment and food system.” The group’s website features a section “COVID-19 origins.” It is possible that the virus escaped from a laboratory. Two U.S. intelligence agencies lean in favor of that theory as do a majority of Americans. However, available evidence has consistently pointed to natural origins. Another $50,000 came from the Crary Social Ecology Fund, a California-based 501(c)(3) charitable foundation that Cause IQ notes “primarily funds charitable activities.” The foundation is overseen by two trustees: John Crary, the president of the financial advisory and investment firm Juniper Capital LLC and director of Scheid Vineyards, and Barbara Crary. Brownstone was just one of several groups that promote anti-vaccine misinformation to receive Crary money. For example, Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), a group that promotes quack COVID treatments like ivermectin and hypes up concerns about the safety of the mRNA vaccines, got $55,000. Last week, the group’s founder, critical care physician Dr. Pierre Kory, invited his Twitter followers to join him in celebrating “the millions of lives saved by ivermectin in Covid,” calling it “an uplifting story as well as a tragic one due to one of History’s most massive global Disinformation campaigns.” Kory, an ally of anti-vaccine activist and Democratic 2024 presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr., also retweeted notorious anti-vaccine entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, who asked his followers, “Is the CDC totally blind to all the adverse events from the COVID vaccines?” “I think they are,” Kirsch wrote. “What do you think? Kory has frequently amplified Kirsch’s anti-vaccine posts, including another tweet from July 7 in declaring, “We are throwing down the gauntlet on whether vaccines can trigger autism,” asking, “Will anyone qualified pick it up?” Kirsch announced he was “assembling a panel of experts (some with h-index over 100 such as Peter McCullough and Paul Marik) who claim vaccines cause autism,” and “would like to know if there is any licensed doctor or academic…or scientist at CDC, FDA, or NIH in America who disagrees with this position would like to question the panel in a live public ‘grand rounds.’” “This is important to get right,” Kirsch wrote. “Their side refuses to be questioned, but our side is open to respectful public challenges from our scientific peers.” Crary money also went to Informed Consent Action Network ($100,000) and Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense ($50,000). The last large Brownstone donor we were able to identify is the Woodshouse Foundation, which gave $50,000. Among the range of groups the foundation gave to are two Koch-backed libertarian groups. Woodshouse gave $75,000 to AIER, and $30,000 to the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason Magazine. Smaller Donations Important Context was able to put names to smaller donations as well. The Schwab Charitable Fund, for example, a donor-advised fund operated by financial titan Charles Schwab and Co., gave Brownstone roughly $6,000. Another $4,000 to the institute came from the Nebraska-based Creigh Family Foundation, which is overseen by corporate and securities attorney James C. Creigh. Creigh is a partner at the national law firm Kutak Rock LLP. According to his profile, he is “a nationally recognized lawyer with extensive experience in corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and other transactional matters” and “has led more than 250 financing and acquisition transactions in both legal and business capacities.” Another $3,500 came from the Quest Family Foundation, a well-funded nonprofit that gives to a number of right-wing groups including fundamentalist Christian organizations and hate groups. In 2021, Quest gave $6,000 to Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. The foundation also gave $10,000 to the Family Research Council and $5,000 to the American Family Association, both of which are designated as anti-LGBTQIA+ hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Quest gave $16,000 to the influential Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive group that provides networking for right-wing donors and operatives, and $2,500 to the Leadership Institute, a dark money group that trains young conservatives to get involved in politics. CNP co-founder Morton Blackwell is the institute’s president. Quest also gave $5,000 to Judicial Watch and $1,000 to Turning Point USA. Questions Remain The donations we identified amount to roughly half of the nine donations that comprise most of Brownstone’s 2021 revenue. Much remains shrouded, including the largest donation to the group: $600,000. As more tax records become available, it is possible questions surrounding Brownstone’s funding will be answered.
This is typical example of how anti-vax nutcases abuse families by claiming their loved one died from Covid vaccination. Many times -- as in this example -- the loved one was not even vaccinated. This does not stop the abusive mob of anti-vaxxers from threatening and abusing the family relentlessly. Finally there is a legal movement afoot to hold those promoting this fake information legally responsible. The Irish Light: Woman abused by paper which falsely said vaccine killed her son https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66424582 A grieving mother and her lawyer have been targeted by an extreme campaign of abuse after suing a conspiracy theory newspaper which falsely claimed her son died from a Covid vaccine. The Irish Light repeatedly abused Edel Campbell online and its supporters have threatened her lawyer with "execution". Conspiracy theorists worldwide have used dozens of tragic deaths to spread vaccine misinformation. This case is thought to be the first where a relative has sued. The Irish Light included Ms Campbell's son, Diego Gilsenan, and 41 others in an article last year which suggested the "untested and dangerous" Covid vaccine was to blame for the deaths. In fact, the BBC has been told Diego had taken his own life in August 2021, aged 18, and had not been vaccinated. The campaign of abuse following her legal case has been "nothing short of shocking" and may explain why other relatives have not taken action, Ms Campbell's solicitor, Ciaran Mulholland, told BBC Radio 4's Marianna in Conspiracyland podcast. "You can understand why a lot of people were incredibly reluctant to go to a solicitor when they saw the backlash with Edel Campbell," he said. Ms Campbell told the BBC that the Irish Light has "made my life hell" and said she's now fearful of speaking out. The BBC has agreed not to use a photo of Ms Campbell - or her son - for this story to protect her. In frequent social media posts over several weeks, the Irish Light and its editor, Gemma O'Doherty, have accused Ms Campbell of "outrageous lies", being "mentally unstable" and involved in a "massive fraud". There are also extreme references to suicide about Ms Campbell. According to Mr Mulholland, people who support the Irish Light have called for him to be executed or shot, as well as anonymously calling his office and threatening other members of staff. Ms Campbell and her solicitor decided to bring a civil case against Ms O'Doherty for harassment with defamation, after the paper published a photo of her son Diego Gilsenan and others on the front page under the headline "Died Suddenly". This tagline has been widely used across social media by conspiracy theory activists to suggest unexpected deaths of young people are related to the Covid-19 vaccine. In the article that featured Ms Campbell's son, the Irish Light claims that the establishment is not questioning the "mysterious deaths" because "they know exactly what it is: the untested and dangerous injection they forced into the Irish people". Deaths from Covid vaccines are extremely rare. UK figures record 55 deaths where the vaccine was given as the underlying cause, out of more than 50m people who have had at least one dose. Among some of the other young people featured by the Irish Light, one died in a swimming pool accident, another from a head injury and a third from meningitis, according to their families. Ms Campbell says the Irish Light did not contact her for comment about Diego before publication. The BBC also understands that the Irish Light did not contact several other family members of young people featured. Mr Mulholland said the aim of the legal case is not "retribution" or compensation. "All Edel Campbell wanted was to protect the integrity of Diego, and her family as a whole," he said. Ms Campbell's legal case has been funded through donations and her lawyer's pro-bono work. He told the BBC the legal proceedings were launched after various attempts to ask Gemma O'Doherty to remove the images of Diego Gilsenan failed and resulted in an escalation in online abuse. In July, the High Court in Dublin granted a restraining order that prohibits the Irish Light editor from contacting Ms Campbell and from using or publishing the image of her son for any purpose without his mother's consent. Abusive posts about Ms Campbell have continued on social media, including from the Irish Light account on X, formerly known as Twitter, which Gemma O'Doherty has admitted to running. Ms Campbell made reports of harassment to the police - but Mr Mulholland says they are yet to contact or question Gemma O'Doherty about these. Garda Síochána - the Republic of Ireland's national police service - told the BBC that it "does not comment on named individuals" or "specifics of on-going investigations". It says it continues to "actively investigate the alleged harassment of an individual in the North Western Region" of Ireland. Ms O'Doherty and the Irish Light have not responded to the BBC's request for comment. However, on social media the Irish Light says the BBC will "do a character assassination" on Gemma O'Doherty because "she exposed the vaccine genocide". In online posts, Ms O'Doherty denies harassing Edel Cambell and continues to suggest her son's death was sinister or mysterious in some way. She has instructed a solicitor to defend the case brought against her. The Irish Light is a sister paper of its namesake in the UK, the Light, although they are editorially independent of each other. The BBC previously revealed the UK paper has called for the execution of politicians and doctors. It has links to the British far-right and a German publication connected to a failed coup attempt. As well as more innocuous features, the Irish Light has published stories promoting conspiracy theories such as "Pfizer knew the vaccine would kill", "Water fluoridation is lowering Irish IQ", "Why manmade climate change is a fraud" and "Irish to become a minority in Ireland". While Ms Campbell is thought to be the first to sue over a false claim about a vaccine death, the case has parallels with other victims of conspiracy theorists. Manchester Arena bomb survivors are suing over claims the attack was faked and parents of Sandy Hook mass shooting victims won a landmark ruling against Infowars host Alex Jones.