Blowing The Whistle On COVID Misinformation

An issue of WorldNetDaily's Whistleblower magazine attacked the "ruling elite" for purportedly suppressing news of dubious treatments for coronavirus -- a narrative that's riddled with false and misleading claims.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 8/30/2021

David Kupelian

The first lie to be exposed was that an entire healthy society should be quarantined – not just the sick and vulnerable, but everybody, including those with virtually zero risk from the virus. This radical departure from previous public health practice served to prolong the pandemic by preventing the necessary attainment of herd immunity. America's booming Trump economy was crushed. Millions lost their jobs and businesses. Little children were needlessly forced to wear masks on the playground, or to stay home from school altogether. The entire nation lived in fear. Suicide, depression, drug addiction, alcoholism and crime all skyrocketed.

Moreover, the radical national lockdown enabled the far left to ride the wave of COVID chaos to shield the worst presidential and vice-presidential candidates in American history, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, from close scrutiny, then to corrupt the 2020 election, and ultimately to install a regime of deranged leftwing revolutionaries untethered to reality, history, the Constitution, the Bible or reason.

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If that isn't surreal enough, there's the elite class's maniacal obsession with forcing everybody, including infants and children, pregnant women and COVID-recovered people with superior immunity, to be injected with an experimental drug despite an unprecedented lack of safety data and thousands of reported deaths after receiving the mRNA jab.

Even more shocking and inexcusable than all of the preceding has been the intentional suppression of well-documented, safe, effective and inexpensive early treatments for COVID-19 that could have saved hundreds of thousands of American lives. That is the considered conclusion of countless frontline COVID-treating doctors in the U.S. and around the world.

Repeat: Safe and effective treatment for COVID-19, which would allow the infected to be treated at home with inexpensive medications safely used for decades, avoiding massive hospitalization and death, has been intentionally suppressed and demonized. Even online discussions about these medications have been largely banned, suppressed or "fact-checked" out of existence by social media for more than a year.

While oddly refusing to say it out loud, WND is referring to hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, and credible research still hasn't proved they are effective treatments for COVID-19. And note that the magazine is concerned with "Trump's booming economy" -- meaning that, at its core, this is ultimately a political, partisan screed, not an impartial examination of medical evidence.

As listed in the promo for the issue, most of the articles in this edition of the magazine were previously published on the WND website -- and include several WND knew or should have known was false or misleading upon their original publication.

The magazine repeated a May 25 article by Art Moore touting fearmongering Dr. Peter McCullough advising people not to get a COVID-19 vaccine because it's "too risky," adding that "There are over 4,000 dead Americans, there are over 10,000 in Europe that die on days one, two and three after the vaccine." Moore claimed the number "comes from reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS."

In fact, a report of an adverse effect to VAERS does not mean there is a proven link to those events and the vaccine -- indeed, the database itself clearly states that "the inclusion of events in VAERS data does not imply causality."

There's also a reprint of what appears to be a June 10 article by Moore, which he touted a study in a New Jersey hospital claiming that hydroxychloroquine -- which Moore labeled the "Trump drug" -- significantly increased survival rates "when used in a high dosage and with zinc." But the study does not make that claim. Hydroxychloroquine was paired with azithromycin, not zinc as Moore reported, and it theorized survival could be increased by as much as 198 percent, not the "nearly three times" Moore claimed. Also, the study came from a preprint server, not a medical journal, meaning it has not been peer-reviewed; experts have noted that the study is an observational one, not a clinical one, and experts have questioned the study's design.

The magazine also includes a reprint of a May 10 column by Jane Orient of the fringe-right Association of American Physicians and Surgeons baselessly fearmongering that the vaccine could harm fertility in young women. As ConWebWatch has documented, Orient's column features other baseless or outright false claims:

• She claimed that "aggressive Israeli vaccination campaign killed more than 200 times as many young persons as the coronavirus itself could have killed during the same 35-week period" when, in fact, fact-checkers found no evidence the vaccine caused any fatal reactions in Israel.
• Like McCullough, she falsely portrayed reports of adverse effects to VAERS as definitive proof of harm when, as noted above, VAERS itself points out that reports do not equal proof.

There's also a reprint of a May 31 article claiming that "A citywide initiative in Mexico City to prescribe ivermectin to COVID-19 patients resulted in a plunge in hospitalizations and deaths." In fact, the study is based on a database analysis, not a clinical study that would be more comprehensive, and it was a preprint that had not been peer-reviewed.

The issue reprinted a June 21 column by noted misinformer Joel Hirschhorn, in which he touted the questionable and poorly documented methods of Dr. Vladimir Zelenko to prove that hydroxychloroquine works, as well as those of French doctor Didier Raoult, who ended up facing disciplinary action over his shoddy research.

The magazine also repeated a May 26 column by Hirschhorn, in which he went into full conspiracy mode over purported suppression of hydroxychloroquine and repeated the falsehood that adverse events reported to VAERS equal proven evidence. Hirschhorn also wrote, "Dr. Joseph Mercola said the vaccine actually is gene editing, which impairs your body's natural immune response." Mercola is a quack who's into even more bogus conspiracy theories than Hirschhorn is, and the mRNA coronavirus vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna do not edit your genes.

Also on the reprint list is a June 14 column by Wayne Allyn Root that recounted an interview with Zelenko in which he ranted that "The American people have been brutalized and are victims of mass murder and crimes against humanity" because of the purported suppression of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID cure, and that "we must bring these criminals to justice."

Despite the fact that it came from the June issue, WND didn't reprint Kupelian's introductory essay from it until Aug. 16. Much of it is a repetition of what was used to promote the issue more than a month earlier, but he has added more conspiratorial claims this time around:

Then, just recently, most Americans finally learned that what Democrats, Big Tech, Big Media, Big Medicine and Big Fact-checkers had censored and mercilessly ridiculed for more than a year as a rightwing, racist, Trumpian conspiracy theory – namely, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was actually created in a U.S.-funded level-4 biolab in Wuhan, China staffed with Chinese military personnel, and didn’t spontaneously jump species from a bat in a nearby “wet market” – turned out to be true.

Actually, there's no credible evidence that the virus was "created" in the Wuhan lab. Even U.S. intelligence officials still haven't been able to determine whether the virus accidentally escaped from the lab or naturally jumped from animal to human. Kupelian went on to fearmonger:

If that isn’t surreal enough, there’s the elite class’s maniacal obsession with forcing every living human being to be injected with an experimental messenger-RNA gene therapy, which they call a “vaccination,” despite an unprecedented lack of safety data and – as of this writing – more than 12,000 American deaths reported after receiving the mRNA jab. Also 1,381 miscarriages, 5,236 heart attacks, 4,044 cases of Bell's Palsy, 4,759 cases of anaphylaxis, 3,728 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, 14,251 people permanently disabled, and over 200,000 trips to the hospital, urgent care of doctors' offices as a result. Other than that, as Biden has assured Americans regarding the COVID jabs: “The bottom line is this – I promise you: They are safe. They are safe. And even more importantly, they’re extremely effective.”

It gets more surreal by the day: Pregnant women, who normally are advised not to put anything even possibly pathogenic into their bodies during their first trimester – even to refrain from drinking wine or eating certain soft cheeses – are now being advised by the head of the CDC to inject a powerful, experimental, little-understood and potentially gene-altering drug into their bodies and that of their developing babies. And 2- and 3-year-olds are now forced to wear masks when it is established beyond doubt that they have essentially zero risk of either contracting or transmitting COVID, yet are damaged physically, mentally and emotionally by being forced to wear a mask all day long in school.

Again: the mRNA vaccines are not gene therapy. He's also lying by misusing VAERS data to claim the vaccine has caused "more than 12,000 American deaths" or any of the other scary things he cites. The vaccine is safe for pregnant women, no matter how much Kupelian wants to spread fear over it. And he's clearly not bothered by the fact that the Delta variant has led to record numbers of children being hospitalized.

Kupelian continued to rant:

Instead of treating COVID-19 early, when it is by far the most manageable, the entire thrust of the elites’ COVID policy has been to quarantine/lockdown everybody and everything in the country – actually the whole world – a surefire recipe for economic and social disintegration of societies (making them ripe for “fundamental transformation,” aka “The Great Reset”) while waiting for a vaccine. Unfortunately, as most people now realize, the mRNA vaccines are extremely flawed – a reality that is becoming more and more painfully evident with every passing week. Yet, despite the huge numbers of reported adverse events and deaths following mRNA vaccination, authorities are still maniacally pushing for everyone to get the jab.

Fortunately, there is an entire underground of frontline medical doctors across the U.S. who are daily treating those infected with SARS-CoV-2 and also prescribing prophylaxis – medicines like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as well as over-the-counter supplements, taken to prevent infection in the first place. Indeed, taking these meds and supplements is precisely how many frontline doctors who treat COVID-19 patients daily avoid becoming infected themselves.

Actually, the pushers of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin tend to be right-wing quacks who lack credibility and put their political agenda before medical reality. Kupelian concluded with a dishonest plug for his magazine:

A recent issue of Whistleblower magazine, which I have edited monthly for over two decades, offers real hope, as well as practical, vital and life-saving information to Americans who have been forced to live in fear, isolation and hardship – and subject to nonstop disinformation – throughout the pandemic, and who are looking for some real light at the end of this long dark tunnel. I urge you to check it out.

Don't bother -- it's a dishonest, medically inaccurate mess.