Fake News
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Yet another hit piece has been published blasting "anti-vaccine" influencers for sharing viewpoints that go against the status quo. This time, the article was published by The Center for Public Integrity, which claims to use investigative reporting to reveal the "causes and effects of inequality."1

The title of the article — "Spreading Vaccine Fears. And Cashing In." — and its content, however, reveal that it's far from actual journalism and nothing more than biased propaganda.2

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm publishing my full response to reporter Liz Essley Whyte below. Whyte contacted Mercola.com in April 2021, stating she was "writing an article about anti-vaccine activists for whom activism is also a way to make money" and asking if I'd be willing to do an interview with her. My team asked for a list of questions and, after repeated follow-ups, those were provided about one month later.

Among them, "What is your response to critics who say your frequent criticism of mainstream medicine, including vaccines, serve to build a customer base and boost your profits?" and "How much does Mercola.com (and/or any other Mercola-branded companies) do in sales and/or profits (in dollar figures) per year? How has that grown over the years? How did the pandemic affect those figures?"

You can see that they're trying to build a case that websites such as mine — which is solely interested in sharing the truth — are only out to make profits or are exploiting the fear generated by mainstream media to sell supplements. But as I stated previously, the real profiteers in this pandemic are not people selling supplements online but billionaires who are only getting richer.

Meanwhile, in their "investigative" piece, The Center for Public Integrity ignored the majority of my responses to their questions, publishing only this:3
"Disagreeing with big pharma and the federal agencies they've captured is a detriment to anyone," Mercola said in a statement. "Placing yourself in the crosshairs of these coordinated attacks is not financially or personally beneficial."
My Full Response to The Center for Public Integrity

If Whyte were truly interested in opening up a conversation about the spreading of fear by mainstream media and its implications to society and COVID-19 vaccinations, it would have been crucial to publish my response — but Whyte did not choose to include it.

For some background, in April 2021, Whyte wrote an article for The Center for Public Integrity titled, "I'm Pregnant. Here's Why I Decided to Get the Coronavirus Vaccine."4 Even her doctor told her that whether or not to get the experimental vaccine while pregnant is "a personal choice," which she said "wasn't exactly useful advice." Ultimately, Whyte wrote, "I concluded the clear benefits of getting vaccinated outweighed unknown and possibly nonexistent risks."5

In my view, giving these vaccines to pregnant women is beyond reprehensible. This experimentation is doubly unforgivable seeing how women of childbearing age have virtually no risk of dying from COVID-19, their fatality risk being a mere 0.01%.6 Pregnant women simply do not need this vaccine, and therefore any risk is likely excessive.

This does give you some insight into Whyte's personal beliefs about vaccination, which were evident in her journalism as well. As for my response to Whyte's questions, you can read it for yourself now, in its entirety:
"Liz,

Unfortunately, disagreeing with big pharma and the federal agencies they've captured is a detriment to anyone. Pharmaceutical PR groups, lobbied politicians, and the controlled media groups criticize those who interfere with the plan to vaccinate everyone from cradle to grave, even if they're compromised. Placing yourself in the crosshairs of these coordinated attacks is not financially or personally beneficial.

Medical risk taking is a personal choice, and that choice must be preserved, and that's exactly what we stand for — preserving the health freedoms of our global community while also exposing false health information provided by pharmaceutical public relations campaigns.

While you may promote the EUA [Emergency Use Authorization] vaccine to pregnant women based on a 20-week rat study, others find that to be reprehensibly negligent advice. The truth is that COVID vaccination for pregnant women is an experiment, and there is not adequate safety testing for these novel injections — even if the V-Safe program states quite clearly that only preliminary information is available.

Unlicensed COVID vaccinations during pregnancy is experimental. To suggest that safety data is 'piling up' is deliberate misinformation. Preliminary Findings of mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine Safety in Pregnant Persons | NEJM.7

Adverse neonatal outcomes included preterm birth (in 9.4%) and small size for gestational age (in 3.2%). Among 221 pregnancy-related adverse events reported to the VAERS, the most frequently reported event was spontaneous abortion (46 cases).

Restrictions to freedom of speech within the big tech monopoly platforms will only accelerate segregation of communities and alternative platforms for nonconformist points of view.

Trust in big tech, big pharma, federal agencies and the media is justifiably broken. I was one of the first to widely publicize that this virus leaked from the Wuhan lab and was immediately discredited by mainstream fact checkers and news sources — Please see attached from NewsGuard.

Ironically, NewsGuard is owned by Publicis, a big tech and big pharma public relations company.8,9 Publicis is not just the owner of the fact checkers, they are partners in campaigns against what they consider to be health 'misinformation.'10

It turns out the owners of Newsguard, campaigning against misinformation, were directly responsible for the deadly opioid marketing campaigns that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.11 More information is available in my latest book if you wish to learn more."12
Media Are on a Campaign to Spread Lies

The Center for Public Integrity hit piece is only the latest in a series of media articles aimed at spreading lies about anyone who speaks out against the standard COVID narrative.

As seems to be the pattern, the "expert" source quoted in the article is Imran Ahmed, who runs the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — a progressive U.K.-based cancel-culture leader13 with extensive ties to government and global think tanks that has labeled people questioning the COVID-19 vaccine as "threats to national security."

Ahmed has gone on record saying he considers anti-vaxxers "an extremist group that pose a national security risk,"14 and admits tracking and spying on 425 vaccine-related Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter accounts.15 CCDH is also partnered with HealthGuard, which is NewsGuard's health-related service.16

In Whyte's article, Ahmed states, "These are old-fashioned snake-oil salesmen. They are willing to let people suffer death, disease in order to make profits for themselves." He adds, "Anti-vaccine influencers are 'a classic example of bad actors who are proficient in digital spaces, at creating outcomes which are bad for us and society ... They react the way you would expect them to."17

However, CCDH's partner NewsGuard is in the business of censoring the truth. NewsGuard previously classified Mercola.com as fake news because we reported the SARS-CoV-2 virus as potentially having been leaked from the biosafety level 4 (BSL4) laboratory in Wuhan City, China, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak. Since then, several members of the U.S. Congress have vowed to launch their own investigation to explore the lab accident theory.18

In May 2021, NPR also published a hit piece about Mercola.com and other vaccine safety advocates designed to disparage and discredit those who are speaking out against COVID propaganda. Similar to The Center for Public Integrity, the line of questioning sent to Mercola.com for comment was not journalism but, rather, aimed at spreading pharmaceutical propaganda.

It wasn't disclosed in the article, for instance, that NPR has received $17.5 million in donations from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which were intended to target coverage of global health and education.19 This may explain why NPR rarely publishes anything critical of Gates and, when it does, "it can feel scripted."20

NPR has also praised Facebook for blatant censorship, with statements such as, "Facebook said it now limits the reach of posts that could discourage people from getting vaccinated, even if the messages don't explicitly break its rules. But the cat-and-mouse game continues."21 Then if you scroll to the bottom, you'll see the editor's note: "Facebook is among NPR's financial supporters."22

May 2021: More Fake News Against Mercola.com

In a similar vein, Coda Story published a false article on May 7, 2021, with misleading and defamatory statements against Mercola.com,23 even though it was in possession of an email with my side of the story. As was the case with The Center for Public Integrity and NPR, I published the full email exchange with Coda Story, so you could read my responses, which, again, were not included in the article.

Coda Story claims that it "tells you stories you never heard before, shows you connections you never knew existed, and investigates the nuance and complexity of the world."24 Surely, then, its reporters would be eager to dive into the counterpoints provided in our email, in order to explore, investigate and share these connections with the world.

In reality, they revealed their true colors, both with the blatant lies they published and their refusal to explore the truth further, even after it was clearly presented. Meanwhile, media are largely ignoring news that deserves to be heard — like NewsGuard's real disinformation campaign based on censoring COVID-19 truth and manufacturing pro-industry propaganda to serve Big Pharma, Big Tech and the deep state.

The fact that Publicis is being sued for its role in creating Purdue's deceptive marketing for OxyContin, which is described as the "crime of the century," is also mostly buried.

The media and its "fact checkers" have succeeded in generating fear and controlling human behavior via the pandemic, and anything that counters its final solution of vaccination is being censored and discredited via biased propaganda disguised as journalism — this is a clue that shouldn't be overlooked.

If you'd like to get involved in the rally behind legislation that prevents the alteration of laws that safeguard our freedoms, check out the Five Freedoms Campaign, which focuses on creating legislation to preserve key freedoms and prevent emergency laws from infringing on your freedom to assemble, worship, protest and engage in business. Legislation is also being crafted to open schools, remove mask mandates and eliminate requirements for vaccine passports.

Sources and References