Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's role as a leading COVID misinformer has unsurprisingly expanded to fearmongering over vaccinating children against COVID. Art Moore served up a prime example in an Oct. 25 article:
As an FDA advisory panel prepares to decide whether or not to recommend the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for young children, Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch is advising parents to remove their children from any public school that forces students to get the shots.
Risch said Sunday night in an interview that children with serious chronic conditions "should be considered for vaccination."
"Other than that, if it were my child, I would homeschool them," he told Fox News host Mark Levin.
Risch, if you'll recall, is the guy who made the wildly false claim that the Delta variant of COVID would be "very mild variant, and the cases are going to go up ... whereas at the same time the mortality is flat, near zero."
An Oct. 26 article by Moore on FDA approval of the Pfizer COVID vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 originally carried the headline "Guinea pigs," though someone later thought better of the slander and removed it. Much of the article uncritically repeated concerns about giving the vaccine to children.
Moore followed up with a different doctor in an Oct. 28 article:
As the federal government considers approving Pfizer's COVID-19 shot for children ages 5 to 11, a Harvard University epidemiologist is urging parents not to vaccinate their children.
Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a biostatistician at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, said in an interview with EpochTV that the risks outweigh any benefit.
A Nov. 1 column by Chuck Norris also hyped Kulldorf's fearmongering.
As we've noted, Kulldorf is one of the founders of the anti-vaxx-friendly Great Barrington Declaration, which pushed dangerous "herd immunity" before COVID vaccines were developed,and he touted a dubious Israeli study claiming that "natural immunity" from catching the virus is usuually better than immunity gained from a vaccine.
Moore found yet another doctor for fearmongering purposes in a Nov. 1 article:
Dr. Ben Carson contends the Biden administration's move to vaccinate young children for COVID-19 amounts to a "giant experiment," arguing there is no sufficient data to determine the long-term risks posed by the shots.
"Do we want to put our children at risk, when we know that the risk of the disease to them is relatively small, but we don't know what the future risks are? Why would we do a thing like that? It makes no sense whatsoever," he said Sunday in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures."
Carson, renowned for his innovative surgeries to save the lives of children, is former director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Children's Center. He served as secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Trump administration.
Carson was a brain surgeon; he has no demostrated expertise in virology or epidemiology.
Moore used a Nov. 8 article to promote claims from a fringe gathering:
Following the CDC's approval of the Pfizer vaccine for young children, scientists and physicians at a summit in Florida warned against a rush to vaccinate a population with very little chance of severe infection from the coronavirus.
The Florida Summit on Covid in Ocala on Saturday addressed three big questions, reported Mary Beth Pfeiffer for TrialSite News. Do young children need vaccination against COVID? Are the vaccinations safe? Are unvaccinated children a threat to adults?
On each question, the physicians and researchers challenged the federal government's conclusions, pointing to studies and data.
But later that month, several people who attended the conference fell ill with COVID, including one doctor who bragged that ivermectin was keeping him healthy. As the Daily Beast noted, "there remains the question of why he became seriously ill in the first place if ivermectin is the wonder drug the anti-vaccine crowd claims it is, rather than primarily a treatment for parasites and head lice in humans, as well as a horse dewormer." Instead, Moore quoted one attendee who "criticized what he described as a corrupt, Big Pharma-controlled system and government that is blocking options for early treatment with inexpensive 'repurposed' drugs such as ivermectin."
Moore and WND have yet to tell their readers about this development.
Moore's parade of misinformers continued in a Nov. 19 article, repeating that "Dr. Scott Atlas, who served briefly as a pandemic adviser to President Trump, contended Friday there is no reason for people under 30 who have almost no risk of serious illness or death from COVID-19 to be vaccinated." The article also featured a return of Carson, who claimed that parents who opposed giving the COVID vaccine to their children "are thinking individuals," adding, "This is still an experiment, and who wants to risk their kid in an experiment?"
