Fake News At WND: Coronavirus Edition, Part 5

WorldNetDaily is so desperate to smear COVID vaccines that it's touting even more dubious misinformation-spreading doctors and even presenting baseless, irresponsible speculation as "news."

By Terry Krepel
Posted 4/3/2023

Art Moore

Apropos of nothing, Bob Unruh fearmongered in a Sept. 8 article:

One of the first patients to take the AstraZeneca COVID-19 shot was Megi Brakadze, 27, a nurse in Georgia, just over the border from Russia.

A day later, she was in a coma, her heart stopped, and physicians were unable to revive her.

They blamed anaphylactic shock.

She had made a video at the time of her shot, explaining, "Vaccines are needed. We are powerless against the virus, we must vaccinate ourselves to avoid diseases or not get seri0usly ill. Although people are afraid, there is nothing dangerous about getting vaccinated. I urge everyone to get vaccinated."

Unruh omitted a couple of facts here. First, the AstraZeneca vaccine has not been approved in the U.S., where much of WND's (dwindling) audience resides, meaning that the story is irrelevant to much of its audience. Second, this incident happened in March 2021 -- more than a year and a half earlier. Thus, it cannot be considered to be "news."

Unruh made the mistake of getting his information for this alleged story from the highly discredited Gateway Pundit, which also hid the date the incident occurred. Unruh went on to uncritically quote from this discredited source:

The report said, "Doctors tried to restart her heart but were not able to revive her completely. For some reason, Megi's story did not make the headlines. It was not allowed."

The video explained the doctor's concluded her death was from anaphylactic shock.

It was confirmed by the Georgian Ministry of Health.

Neither Unruh nor the Gateway Pundit offered any evidence to counter the report of the cause of Brakadze's death. But Unruh somehow did manage to avoid repeating the GP's false claim that "For some reason, Megi’s story did not make the headlines. It was not allowed." In fact, as a reputable news organization reported, "Megi Bakradze's death and the investigation that followed has been headline news in Georgia for months, widely discussed in public and on social media" -- to the point that her death hindered vaccine campaigns in the country.

But both Unruh and GP omitted the fact that -- as that reputable news organization also reported -- there's still a dispute over what link there is, if any, between the vaccine and Brakadze's death. One review found no link between the vaccine and her death, and there is a dispute over whether the woman was properly and quickly treated with epinephrine as her allergic reaction became clear.

But Unruh doesn't care about facts that contradict the narrative he's being (sporadically) paid to push. His job -- as is that of every other WND employee -- is to spread fear about COVID vaccines.

Promoting bad studies

It wouldn't be WND if it wasn't promoting bad studies that fearmonger about COVID vaccines, and Art Moore is at it again in a Sept. 27 article:

A top London cardiologist who was one of the first to take the COVID-19 vaccine and promote it on British television now is calling for a suspension of the shots, arguing in a scientific paper that there is evidence the risk of harm is greater than any benefit.

Dr. Aseem Malhotra, who presented his paper at a news conference in the British capital Tuesday, said "there is a strong scientific, ethical, and moral case to be made that COVID-19 vaccines rollout must stop immediately until raw data has been released for fully independent scrutiny."

His paper, published in the Journal of Insulin Resistance in two parts, here and here, is titled "Curing the pandemic of misinformation on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines through real evidence-based medicine."

Joined at the news conference by Dr. Ryan Cole, a Mayo Clinic-trained pathologist, and Dr. Tess Lawrie, co-founder of the non-profit World Council for Health, Malhotra said real-world safety data indicate a rise in hospital cardiac arrests and heart attacks linked to Pfizer's COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.

The presence of Cole and Lawrie -- both prolific COVID misinformers that WND has previously promoted -- should be a warning that this was going to be a misinfo-fest. Months earlier, Moore and columnist Jack Cashill touted how Lawrie attacked a researcher who retracted his support for ivermectin as a COVID treatment after realizing it didn't work, and WND has previously given dubious doc Cole space to spout his anti-vaxxer views.

Given that, it's no surprise that Moore quickly moved to try and burnish Malhotra's alleged credibility:

An internationally renowned expert in the prevention, diagnosis and management of heart disease, Malhotra is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and president of the Scientific Advisory Committee of The Public Health Collaboration. He also is an honorary council member to the Metabolic Psychiatry Clinic at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Actually, as Science-Based Medicine noted, Malhotra published a book promoting what the British Dietetic Association called one of the "Top 5 worst celeb diets to avoid in 2018." Moore continued:

He began his presentation, hosted by Lawrie's World Council for Health, talking about the concept of "willful blindness."

"I was willfully blind, certainly in relation to the vaccine and the harms, until I wasn't," he said.

Malhotra said that's why it's crucial that the issue be tackled both with the facts and with compassion, "because there are many people who are still willfully blind."

As happens so often with so-called studies that Moore promotes, this one is shoddy. As Health Feedback documented, Malhotra's article "cherry-picked evidence supporting the narrative that COVID-19 vaccines are ineffective and possibly harmful, while ignoring the larger body of evidence showing that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective." Science-Based Medicine further exposed the shoddiness of Malhotra's research:

As I said at the beginning, one of the favorite tactics of quacks, cranks, and antivaxxers is projection: To accuse their critics of what they themselves are guilty of, and both of Dr. Malhotra’s articles are prime examples of this tactic, starting right from the title, in which he claims the mantle of evidence-based medicine for himself against what he characterizes as “misinformation” coming from health authorities and the conventional press. Interestingly, Dr. Malhotra barely uses the word “misinformation” in his first article, but uses it much more frequently in his second article, as though he were doubling down on his first assertion.

[...]

For instance, COVID-19 cranks (like Dr. Malhotra) take advantage of the low quality and reliability of a lot of medical research to contribute even more to that low reliability by publishing propaganda in journals like The Journal of Insulin Resistance. Indeed, I once called this phenomenon scientific review articles weaponized as disinformation, a label that describes Dr. Malhotra’s two part “narrative review” quite well.

Looking back at both articles, it’s clear to me that the first article was intended to sow doubt about COVID-19 vaccines through the use of a compelling anecdote about his father followed by cherry-picked data. As much as I might feel sorry for Dr. Malhotra because of his loss, I cannot allow that feeling to prevent my directly addressing his misuse of the anecdote of his father’s death to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about vaccines. The second article is more of a generalized antivaccine rant that uses tried and untrue techniques that try to paint big pharma and government regulatory entities as so completely corrupt (as well as ideology- and profit-driven) that they ignore evidence of harm.

[...]

Dr. Malhotra’s article is projection, pure and simple, or, as I put it: “I know you are, but what am I?” He’s accusing conventional medical authorities, big pharma, and social media companies of spreading medical misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines by using the very techniques of misinformation that he claims to decry, such as cherry-picked studies and conspiracy theories, to do it. I know you are, but what am I, indeed.

Rather than noting any criticism of Malhotra's work, Moore simply parrots it. And he continued to do so: Moore uncritically repeated Malhotra's claims in an Oct. 5 article, and he gave Malhotra another uncritical platform to spread misinformation in an Oct. 19 article:

A top London cardiologist who was one of the first to take the COVID-19 vaccine and promote it on British television is warning his colleagues and the public he has evidence tying the incidences around the world of "unexpected" cardiac events in otherwise healthy people to the COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr. Aseem Malhotra made the statement in a video posted Wednesday on Twitter.

"It is my duty and responsibility as a consultant cardiologist and public health campaigner to urgently inform doctors, patients and members of the public that the COVID mRNA vaccine has likely played a significant role of being a primary cause in all unexpected cardiac arrests, heart attacks, strokes, cardiac arrhythmias and heart failure since 2021, until proven otherwise," he said.

Moore censored the fact that Malhotra's earlier work had been exposed as the misinformation it is -- instead, he parroted it yet again, right down to the bogus appeal to authority by listing his credentials.

An inquisitive reporter Moore is not -- he's nothing but a partisan stenographer.

Moore got some help in spreading COVID misinformation from a Florida man in an Oct. 10 article:

Breaking ranks with the CDC, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo is urging men aged 18 to 39 not to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

In a tweet censored by Twitter, Ladapo cited a Florida Department of Health analysis that found the mRNA jabs raise the risk of cardiac-related death by 84% in young males.

[...]

In March, Ladapo announced the state had become the first to recommend against vaccinating healthy children for COVID-19. The announcement came at the end of an 85-minute roundtable of epidemiologists and other medical scientists hosted by DeSantis titled "The Curtain Close on COVID Theater." The governor posed questions regarding the effectiveness of the vaccines in reducing infection and transmission as well as the crucial issue of safety. Among the participants were Drs. Robert Malone, Harvey Risch of Yale, Jay Battacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford and Martin Kulldorf, formerly of Harvard.

The new Florida Department of Health analysis analysis was criticized by some scientists, but Ladapo countered Monday on Twitter with a point-by-point rebuttal.

The surgeon general said he welcomed the debate.

"Isn't it great when we discuss science transparently instead of trying to cancel one another?" he wrote on Twitter.

Except that few of the "rebuttal" points Ladapo issued, as copy-and-pasted by Moore, addressed the many issues legitimate medical professionals have identified with the study -- starting with the fact that it was anonymously written, unlike virtually every other research study in existence. As a media outlet that cares about honest reporting detailed:

More than a dozen experts interviewed by The Washington Post — including specialists in vaccines, patient safety and study design — listed concerns with Florida’s analysis, saying it relies on information gleaned from frequently inaccurate death certificates rather than medical records, skews the results by trying to exclude anyone with covid-19 or a covid-related death, and draws conclusions from a total of 20 cardiac-related deaths in men 18 to 39 that occurred within four weeks of vaccination. Experts noted the deaths might have been caused by other factors, including underlying illnesses or undetected covid.

“We’re talking about a very small number of deaths. An extra death or two would potentially change these results,” said Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and co-author of a patient-safety textbook used in many medical schools. “I’m hesitant to even call it a paper; it isn’t published anywhere. The idea that [the analysis] ... is being used to change policy — it does not have the scientific chops to do that.”

“If you submitted that to a peer-reviewed journal, unless you were paying them to publish it, it would get rejected,” added Daniel Salmon, who leads the Institute of Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Putting out half-baked reports from a department of health is a dangerous thing to do.”

By contrast, Moore talked to no experts and merely regurgitated Ladapo's claims about the study without bothering to fact-check anything he said. He did, however, admit the study has not been peer-reviewed, so he gets a brownie point for that. He also added a video of an interview Ladapo did on Steve Bannon's far-right webcast "War Room: Pandemic," which also does not inspire confidence in anything Ladapo has to say. Not that Moore will tell you any of that, of course; his job is to fearmonger and misinform, not report honestly.

Loving Harvey Risch

Harvey Risch is yet another COVID misinformer WND has regularly promoted, and like fellow misinformers Peter McCullough and Robert Malone, he got the full interview treatment with Art Moore in an Oct. 16 article. Because Risch had to be puffed up to give his misinfo some gravitas, Moore led things off by reciting his resume:

Dr. Harvey Risch has a distinguished career as a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, with more than 300 original peer-reviewed publications that include advances in cancer research. He's the editor of the International Journal of Cancer, associate editor of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and for six years was on the editorial board of the American Journal of Epidemiology.

But over the past two and a half years, establishment media have labeled him a purveyor of "misinformation" for his criticism of the public health response to the pandemic and his advocacy – including in Senate testimony – for treating COVID-19 with drugs that have been shown to be safe and effective, such as hydroxychloroquine (367 studies) and ivermectin (92 studies). Further, the government and scientific establishment have suppressed and dismissed his scientific contributions to the global crisis with little or no engagement, adopting the media's "disinformation" narrative.

In a one-hour video interview with WND (embedded below) that includes his reaction to the FDA's new COVID booster shot, Risch was matter-of-fact about the current state of medical science.

"All of this censorship, all of these claims of misinformation, disinformation, is purely a statement of: We cannot fight on the playing field of ideas, of argument. We do not have the ability to fight back against those positions, and so we are using the tool of censorship instead," he told WND.

Risch, describing the "misinformation" tactic as "totalitarian," said the pandemic has opened the eyes of Americans to longstanding corruption in the medical establishment that has shattered trust. He discussed the fundamental problem of government serving the big pharmaceutical companies instead of the people, with influential figures in a revolving door between the governmental and private worlds.

Indeed, Risch has lowered himself to doing interviews with less-than-credible outlets like WND precisely because he knows he'll never be exposed as a misinformer and always be celebrated as someone with a "distinguished career" who can be portrayed as a "victim" whenever his misinformation gets called out by more credible media outlets. And he knows that an anti-vaxxer reporter like Moore will always suck up to him and hype that "distinguished career" and never ask him challenging questions that threaten the narrative he's trying to push.

There are reasons WND is perpetually on the edge of extinction, and Moore's sycophancy is just one of them.

The doctor-death conspiracy

Moore served up yet another COVID conspiracy in an Oct. 18 article:

An alarming spike in the deaths of young Canadian doctors since the COVID-19 vaccine was mandated for health-care workers demands an investigation, a physician and cancer researcher told the Canadian Medical Association.

Dr. William Makis, a nuclear medicine physician with more than 100 peer-reviewed research publications, also called for an immediate end to COVID-19 vaccine mandates in Canadian health care, the Gateway Pundit reported.

"Our analysis shows Canadian doctor deaths under age 50 in 2022 will be 2-fold higher compared to 2019-2020," he wrote. "Shockingly, doctor deaths under age 40 are 5-fold higher, and doctor deaths under age 30 are 8-fold higher."

Makis noted that at the Canadian Medical Association-sponsored International Conference on Physician Health last week, a topic that was not discussed was "young Canadian doctors dying suddenly and unexpectedly after COVID vaccine rollout."

[...]

Addressing CMA leaders Dr. Katharine Smart and Dr. Alika Lafontaine, he said "both of you failed or refused to respond to my letter, and you also failed or refused to respond to inquiries made by American philanthropist Mr.Steve Kirsch, as well as inquiries made by journalists."

"I am now providing you an update with information about 80 young Canadian doctors who died suddenly or unexpectedly since the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines," he wrote. "Four more doctors have died since my previous letter, and these unexpected deaths are accelerating. You cannot continue to ignore this."

Makis said he and his team have assembled a database of 1,638 Canadian doctor deaths during the period 2019-2022, with 972 of them from CMA's website. Our preliminary analysis of this extensive data suggests that Canadian doctor deaths under age 50 in 2022 will be 2-fold higher compared to the 2019-2020 average.

In fact, there's no evidence to suggest doctors are dying from the COVID vaccine, and Makis won't provide access to his database. As usual, Moore's pumping up of Makis' credentials in order to lean into the authority fallacy is a tell that he's trying to hide the fact that what's underneath is bogus.

WND columnist Wayne Allyn Root has peddled this bogus conspiracy theory as well.

The next day, Moore brought back a misinformer, complete with a similar appeal to authority:

A top London cardiologist who was one of the first to take the COVID-19 vaccine and promote it on British television is warning his colleagues and the public he has evidence tying the incidences around the world of "unexpected" cardiac events in otherwise healthy people to the COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr. Aseem Malhotra made the statement in a video posted Wednesday on Twitter.

"It is my duty and responsibility as a consultant cardiologist and public health campaigner to urgently inform doctors, patients and members of the public that the COVID mRNA vaccine has likely played a significant role of being a primary cause in all unexpected cardiac arrests, heart attacks, strokes, cardiac arrhythmias and heart failure since 2021, until proven otherwise," he said.

An internationally renowned expert in the prevention, diagnosis and management of heart disease, Malhotra is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and president of the Scientific Advisory Committee of The Public Health Collaboration. He also is an honorary council member to the Metabolic Psychiatry Clinic at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Late last month, Malhotra called for a suspension of the shots, arguing in a scientific paper that there is evidence the risk of harm is greater than any benefit.

As we documented when Moore publicized that study, Malhotra normally peddles celebrity diets and the study was filled with low-quality data that made it largely worthless.

Moore touted more fearmongering in an Oct. 26 article:

Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration quietly disclosed it found that the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine posed a possible increased risk of four serious heart and cardiovascular conditions in elderly people.

The FDA provided little detail at the time, July 2021, and promised to "share further updates and information with the public as they become available," points out investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi in an article published by the British Medical Journal.

Eighteen days later, the FDA issued a document outlining a planned epidemiological study to investigate the matter. The preliminary estimate of the increased risk of the cardiac adverse events from the vaccine ranged from 42% to 91%.

"More than a year later, however, the status and results of the follow-up study are unknown," wrote Demasi. "The agency has not published a press release, or notified doctors, or published the findings by preprint or the scientific literature or updated the vaccine's product label."

But Moore didn't tell his readers that Demasi has a record of shoddy work. In 2018, a medical journal retracted a study by her purporting to link cell phones to cancer due to reuse of images; five days before Moore's article was published, an article co-authored by Demasi was marked with an "expression of concern," again due to the use of duplicated images. So she doesn't seem very trustworthy, even though she managed to get a article published in an actual prestigious medical journal.

Irresponsible speculation as 'news'

WorldNetDaily is so dedicated to spreading COVID misinformation that it's even trying to amplify baseless rumors. An anonymously written Oct. 25 article declared:

With the multitude of side effects and other problems that now are appearing and are attributed to the COVID-19 shots that were mandatory for so many, a glitch in a performance by a celebrity is not without such claims.

It was singer Katy Perry who recently suffered an unusual episode where she appeared to be unable to open her right eye for a time.

[...]

It lasted about 15 seconds and drew the immediate concern that, "She got that Pfizer eye," from those attributing the development to a COVID shot.

A Fact Check by Newsweek pointed out that Perry fans "became very concerned for the pop star when her eye appeared to refuse to open."

[...]

The report noted, "But many social media users joked the eye closing was the result of a side-effect from a Covid-19 vaccine, bringing a misleading anti-vaccine narrative back to the surface."

The report noted Perry hasn't acknowledged the issue, but it claimed, "There is no evidence to support claims that vaccines, COVID or otherwise, caused it."

If there's no actual evidence to link COVID vaccines to Perry's eye issue beyond speculation from Twitter trolls, there's no reason for this story to exist. But WND must denigrate COVID vaccines even when there's no factual basis to do so, so it published this story. No wonder the WND writer was apparently so ashamed at having to write this thing that he or she refused to put their name on it.

Not to be outdone on irresponsible speculation, Joe Kovacs wrote in an Oct. 30 article:

A top Republican lawmaker died suddenly on Sunday at the age of 55, and with no cause of death provided, some are wondering if a COVID vaccine possibly played a part.

Hugh McKean, Colorado's House minority leader, died in his home just three days after turning 55.

[...]

With many news agencies not even raising the possibility of a possible COVID-vaccine connection, J.D. Rucker at The Liberty Daily wondered "Was it the jabs?" as he blasted "the increasingly large category of conservative news outlets who refuse to mention the words 'COVID' or 'vaccine' in any story that deals with sudden inexplicable deaths of young and otherwise healthy people."

"This is due to the tyrants in Big Tech who will blacklist any news outlets that even ask the question. Google and YouTube will cut off their big ad dollar checks. Facebook will cut off the massive amounts of traffic they send to news outlets. It's an unfortunate reality that even respectable conservative or alternative news outlets won't dare risk their gravy trains."

Rucker concluded: "The truth is starting to come out. It's usually dropping in trickles. Sometimes the spigot lets out a bit more. Over time, the people will see the truth. We can only hope and pray it reaches as many in time as possible."

Others on Twitter commented:

"Will the true autopsy be released?"

"We need to know WHY??? I hate autopsies but please let us know what caused him to pass so young in such an important state!"

"When was he last b??std with the j@b of death?"

Never mind the fact that "a possible COVID-vaccine connection" was not mentioned because there is absolutely no reason to do so. Kovacs is clearly such a wildly irresponsible reporter that he's happy to promote rumors as fact to push his employer's tide of dishonesty against COVID vaccines. It turns out that McKean died of a heart attack -- not unheard of in a 55-year-old man.

We'd complain about irresponsible reporting here, but irresponsible, nonfactual "reporting" is WND's brand.