“Fact-checkers” are liars for the narrative. By Flat White.

It is an almost daily occurrence. A huge story breaks online. Some CEO, company, or politician was caught in a lie and now the truth is splattered all over the internet like a crime scene. This trends for a while, with the fallout gaining momentum and threatening the bank balances of powerful individuals. …

Then in come the ‘fixers’. The ‘fact-checkers’ who use their big, digital eraser to edit the facts.

The public are told that they didn’t hear or see what they definitely heard and that their understanding of the truth lacks ‘context’ or is ‘misinformed’ in some way. It’s all about softening the story so that it can be buried, and the media – cowards that they are – allow it to happen.

Example:

During a European Union Parliamentary inquiry, Robert Roos asked Pfizer executive Janine Small if Pfizer had investigated their vaccine for preventing transmission before it was made available to the public. Her reply was the now infamous, ‘no’ and ‘we had to move at the speed of science’ including ‘doing everything at risk’.

This matters, because there are countless tweets, interviews, and public releases from Pfizer and associated entities all claiming that — to some extent or other — their vaccine significantly prevented transmission. It was a publicly stated fact that was used as the basis for widely criticised mandatory vaccination requirements, vaccine passports, and isolation orders for the unvaccinated.

Pfizer’s transmission claims caused the largest global abuse of human rights in living memory, so yes — it matters. The revelation that transmission remained a question mark is a public disaster for Pfizer and may lead to legal challenges.

Don’t worry, the Twitter fact-checkers are here. Within 24-hours the social media platform had a sticky-trend (something they pin to the sidebar) stating: ‘Recent claims about Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine trial and impact on transmission are misleading, fact-checkers report.’

It was followed by: ‘According to the Associated Press, Pfizer never claimed the clinical trial of their Covid-19 vaccine evaluated its effect on transmission. Reuters also reported that in clinical trials, vaccines were found to give recipients a high level of protection against severe disease — but effect on transmission, due to trial sizes, could not be immediately determined.’

That’s strange.

Pfizer’s official Twitter account posted, ‘The ability to vaccinate at speed to gain herd immunity and stop transmission is our highest priority. There is a lot of work ahead, and our focus is on supporting points of vaccination, as that’s key to increasing the volume of people getting vaccinated every day.’

Both herd immunity and stopping transmission have turned out to be false for Covid.

You can watch the Pfizer CEO speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos stating, ‘You vaccinate not only yourself, you vaccinate also to protect society, in particular to protect those that you love the most.’ Such a statement is predicated on preventing transmission. …

Not only was it stated in dozens of interviews, but the President of the United States said it, our chief health officer said it, the World Health Organisation and CDC said it. Where did these institutions and officials get their claim on preventing transmission, if not from the ‘experts’ that they say were cited?

The grand sleight of hand used in nearly every release to imply transmission is the phrase, ‘reduces symptomatic infection and therefore transmission’ allowing them to make statements like ‘90 per cent effective’ and have that used as a transmission argument.

Fact-checkers can moan all they like, but we lived through the last two years and we know what was said.

And if we are so interested in fact-checking why, when it became obvious in the earliest months of the vaccine roll-out, wasn’t the claim rescinded (rather than repeated) by Pfizer and others as Covid spread through fully-vaccinated communities?

There were no fact-checkers rushing to correct the public record when the claims of politicians, health authorities, and Big Pharma were proven false — in fact, it was the fact-checkers who saw to it that the people speaking the truth were banned, ridiculed, or told they were ‘missing context’.

“Fact”-creators:

The fact-checkers of today are becoming fact-creators. Instead of helping people keep an eye on fake news, they protect corporate entities from ‘social damage’. Fact-checkers insist that damaging information or genuine lies told by CEOs and politicians ‘lack context’ or were ‘said in error’ and are therefore ‘fake’.

Fact-checkers operating with authority, creating their own facts are far more dangerous than an unmoderated forum. Today, they are nothing more than corporate ‘fixers’ – the shadowy, anonymous keyboard warriors sent in to clean up after the scandal.

Fact checkers have a useful role: they tell us what the narrative people want us to believe.

And if the fact checkers rush out to say something, at least we know the opposite is probably true.