On Wednesday, Congressman Thomas Massie — who is known for calling it how he sees it — tweeted a bombshell claim about factcheck.org, one of Facebook’s most prominent “fact checking” groups. In short, Massie claimed that the folks fact checking claims on vaccines are funded in part by an organization that holds over $1.8 billion of stock in a vaccine company.
“Who pays the paychecks of the factcheckers?” Massie wrote, adding, “The vaccine fact checkers a @factcheckdotorg, who claim to be independent, are funded by an organization that holds over $1.8 billion of stock in a vaccine company, and is run by a former director of @CDCgov”.
In his Tweet Massie linked to an article from theblaze.com which laid out the connections clearly. The folks at Factcheck.org also weighed in on the thread, linking to their financial backer page which confirms their ties to the industry.
According to their own source, Factcheck.org is funded in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. According to the foundation’s 2019 financial statement, the project holds over $1.8 billion of stock in the COVID-19 manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson.
What’s more, the CEO of the foundation is Richard Besser, the former acting director of the CDC under Obama and ABC News’ former chief health and medical editor. According to the article in the Blaze, Congressman Massie has personal ties to Factcheck.org as they allegedly ran a hit piece on him.
Rep. Thomas Massie forced the CDC to correct a report that implied there is evidence that the current vaccines on the market can convey a greater degree of immunity than prior infection. FactCheck.org cannot allow Massie to get away with taking away market share from its donors by dissuading people with prior infection from getting the vaccines, so the site wrote a hit piece on him trying to suggest that he had made an error.
With over 3,400 reported deaths and tens of thousands of adverse reactions reported to the CDC’s surveillance system – and it’s well known that just a fraction of those events are reported – how can we allow the government to actively work with a corporate and tech monopoly, funded by the very people who stand to benefit, to censor important data, science, and medical information? We have already seen the government temporarily suspend one vaccine, while the CEO of Pfizer conveniently waited until people already got sucked in to say they will need a third shot and likely more. Nothing to see here? Pure as the wind-driven snow?
Anyone who even questions the safety of the vaccine on Facebook’s platform is immediately slapped with a fact check warning by this group. This is in spite the alarming number of reported adverse reactions, including thousands of deaths within the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
As TFTP reported, the sheer number of reports alone should be enough to set off some alarm bells. But this has not happened. Instead, the mainstream media “fact checks” those who merely try to point out this information.
In several “fact checks” of this data, we are told that we shouldn’t “draw conclusions about the safety of vaccines.” This is absolutely true, but the very reason VAERS was created is to conduct surveillance of potential issues with vaccines. If there have been more adverse events reported in three months than there have been over any year since 1990, this should, at the very least, spark an official inquiry.
From 2011 to 2020, there were just 994 deaths reported to VAERS after ALL vaccinations. In the first quarter of 2021, there have been over 2,700 reported deaths. If they are truly claiming to surveil the vaccine safety realm, this is the type of thing that should set off an alarm or an investigation.
But we have not seen one. Instead, mainstream “fact check” articles are rolled out that do not dispute the actual data and instead question the way others present it. While much of the data has been skewed to make a misleading point, fact checking without questioning the increase does a disservice to the pursuit of investigative journalism.
While we have no direct proof that the vaccine manufacturers are dictating the narrative to the fact checkers, the old saying of “follow the money” exists for a reason. What’s more, these fact check groups like Factcheck.org and Politifact have no problem espousing their subjective nature and if we look at their history, their political tendencies are overt.
It is always a good practice to check multiple sources for information and never rely on a single source for your world view. As the fact checkers and mainstream media have proven, no one gets it right all the time and getting it wrong is often great for business.