Reuters Fake Fact-Check Fails Again

I had the pleasure of being contacted by Reuters Fact Check last week, with a demand that I explain and justify a headline on a story I wrote about COVID vaccines. I immediately started laughing.

Why?

Well, I should probably explain Reuters Fact Check first.

Reuters Fact Check is one of the many disreputable fact-check organizations that Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg cut ties with in January because, in his words, “The fact checkers have been too politically biased and destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the US.” At the time, Zuckerberg cut financial links with Reuters Fact Check and about two-thirds of the entire fact checking industry.

Zuckerberg began to change his tune about fact checking last May after House Republicans released Meta’s internal communications. Zuckerberg and other Meta executive were exposed complaining in texts and emails that the Biden White House pressured them to censor COVID topics, and they discussed fact checkers falsely labeling some posts as false.

Reuters launched their fact checking initiative in partnership with Meta back in 2020, claiming in a press release, “Reuters has a superior track record in sourcing, verifying and clearing user-generated content for distribution to thousands of clients globally and we are best placed in using our in-house expertise to fact check social media content.”

Well, not really. Like all the fact check organizations, Reuters fact checks narratives, not facts. But before getting into any details, let’s wind the clock back to 2022 when Dr. Kerryn Phelps testified before the Australian Parliament about her COVID vaccine injury.

“Regulators of the medical profession have censored public discussion about adverse events following immunisation,” Phelps testified, “with threats to doctors not to make any public statements about anything that ‘might undermine the government’s vaccine rollout’ or risk suspension or loss of their registration.”

Laying out the details of how the COVID vaccine harmed her and her wife, Phelps explained that medical professionals dismissed vaccine injury, a point driven home by the venue for her testimony: an Australian government inquiry, not on vaccine injury, but on Long COVID. Phelps’ credentials made it hard for fact checkers and pharma friendly reporters to shoot her down. She is a conjoint professor at the NICM Health Research Institute, the first woman elected president of the Australian Medical Association (AMA), and a former member of the Australian Parliament.

What became clear at the time, however, is that people injured by the COVID vaccine would only be taken seriously if they discussed their symptoms as a type of Long COVID. A group of Australian patients injured by the COVID vaccine called COVERSE submitted testimony to Australian Parliament that adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines could be mistaken for Long COVID, given significant overlap in symptoms.

This second point was further underlined in Brianne Dressen’s book Worth a Shot?: Secrets of the Clinical Trial Participant Who Inspired a Global Movement. Dressen recounts participating in a U.S. COVID vaccine clinical trial only to be vaccine injured. Some of her story was documented in a Science Magazine article on the NIH’s investigation of COVID vaccine injuries.

Dressen later founded the advocacy group, React 19, for patients harmed by COVID vaccine, and describes in her book how many vaccine injured patients are misdiagnosed with Long COVID.

Dressen is also one of the 28 authors on the preprint I covered that discussed patients who had been harmed by the COVID vaccine: “Yale Researchers Find COVID Spike Protein in Blood 709 Days After Vaccination, Positing Millions of Long COVID Patients May Actually Be Vaccine Injured.”

My headline triggered an anonymous writer for Reuters Fact Check to contact me demanding an explanation:

The senior authors of the paper and independent experts we consulted all refuted that claim, saying there is no such evidence or conclusion in the study.

We wanted to offer you the opportunity to comment on whether you stand by your article and, if possible, to point us to any evidence in the paper that supports your assertion.

I started laughing at first, as Reuters Fact Check has a tattered history with numerous fact checks undermined by scientific research as well as the very Yale study they were citing and that I had reported on. Here’s how I responded to Reuters in email:

MY EMAIL TO REUTERS:

Reuters Fact Check falsely asserted, “The mRNA instructs cells to make the [spike] protein and is broken down by the body shortly thereafter” although the new study found “spike in circulation up to 709 days after vaccination.” When does Reuters Fact Check plan to correct this falsehood in accordance with what is reported in this new study?

Reuters Fact Check asserted, “There is no proof that spike proteins created in response to mRNA vaccines are harmful to the body.” However, the new study reported:

Interaction with full-length S, its subunits (S1, S2), and/or peptide fragments with host molecules may result in prolonged symptoms in certain individuals. Recently, a subset of non-classical monocytes has been shown to harbor S protein in patients with PVS. Further, biodistribution studies on mRNA–LNP platforms in animal models indicate its ability to cross the blood-brain barrier, and the local S expression could result in neurocognitive symptoms.

When does Reuters Fact Check plan to correct this falsehood in accordance with what is reported in this new study?

I spoke for several hours on background with one of the paper's 28 authors, so who is Reuters Fact Check speaking with?

Did you notice that each time I caught Reuters with a fake fact check, their mistakes always favored the pharmaceutical industry? Well, Reuters Fact Check never responded to me. Instead, Reuters posted a fake fact check that never bothered to quote anything I sent them. Nor did Reuters go back and correct their fake fact checks from the past. And their fake headline attacked something that was never claimed.

Nobody I’m aware of, nor anyone I have spoken with thinks “Long COVID is a vaccine injury” as Reuters falsely contends. But with tens of millions of Americans reported to have Long COVID, some subset of these patients are likely vaccine injured.

Reuters Fact Check simply made up a claim, debunked it, and proclaimed victory. This is exactly how another former Meta fact checker, Leadstories.com, behaved when they did a fake fact check of a BMJ investigation that exposed problems with Pfizer’s COVID clinical trial.

I spoke to Dr. Danice Hertz, another of the study authors, to get her views on fake fact checks and why so many medical professionals have politicized the issue of vaccines. “Up until this moment, vaccine injury was not acknowledged,” Hertz told me. “And there’s been a concerted effort to cover it up.”

A couple weeks after Zuckerberg cut ties in January with biased fact checkers like Reuters, he sat for an interview with Joe Rogan and complained that Meta was pressured to censor anything on vaccine side effects.

“Who’s pressuring you take down things that talk about vaccine side effects,” Rogan asked.

“It was people in the Biden administration,” Zuckerberg said.