Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily loves to spread fake news about COVID vaccines, and Peter LaBarbera served up his fake-news offering in a June 21 article, under the alarmist headline "CDC chief KNEW COVID vaccine didn't work while pushing shots":
A newly unearthed email by former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky reveals that she, former NIH Director Francis Collins and COVID point man Dr. Anthony Fauci discussed dangerous “vaccine breakthroughs” of COVID infections at the same time they were telling the public that the vaccines would prevent people from becoming infected – a narrative she continued for months.
Walensky's redacted email, produced through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, is dated Jan. 30, 2021, shortly after the Biden government began rolling out the COVD vaccines, which quickly became mandatory for military servicemembers and government workers, as well as in the corporate world – punishing those who refused to take the shot.
In the email, Walensky writes: "I had a call with Francis Collins this morning and one of the issues we discussed was that of vaccine breakthroughs."
"This is clearly an important area of study and was specifically called out this week here," she writes, linking to a January 8, 2021 "viewpoint" article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, on COVID vaccine breakthroughs titled, "SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines and the Growing Threat of Viral Variants." The article discusses new COVID mutations that "immediately raised concerns among vaccine researchers."
Walensky writes in the email: "Nancy and I discussed this briefly a few weeks ago and I understand that –" whereupon a large chunk of her email is redacted.
LaBarbera reather deliberately missed the point -- and, thus, chose to mislead and lie to his readers. Contrary to LaBarbera's headline, the original COVID vaccines did work, providing a high degree of effectiveness in prevention of transmission and in reducing severity of symptoms in those who did catch it. The JAMA article LaBarbera mentioned in passing did not attack those vaccines because they "didn't work"; it argued that new COVID variants would make them less effective, which is exactly what happened. And that's why the vaccines are regularly reformulated to target newly circulating variants. And as experts have pointed out, all vaccines have some degree of breakthrough infections, and no vaccine is 100 percent effective. And those who got COVID after being vaccinated saw milder symptoms than those who were unvaccinated.
But rather then tell his readers these facts, LaBarbera chose to push a right-wing anti-vaxx narrative instead:
Reaction poured in from conservatives and others outraged by the revelation that Walensky and others key COVID policy figures were well aware of the experimental vaccines' shortcomings, even as they championed the vaccines and pushed mandates on the public while demonizing people who refused the shots for various reasons, including that they had no need for them because they'd gained natural immunity by contracting COVID.
It's shoddy, biased and incomplete reporting like this that is costing WND readers. But WND is choosing to stay rooted in conspiracy theories instead of trying to improve the quality and reliability of its "news" product.
