After The Gateway Pundit Calls Out Their Fake “Fact-Check” – Lead Stories Downgrades But Won’t Remove Flag Because They Disagree with How the Headline “Sounds”

The Gateway Pundit reported last week on how Big Tech and Big Pharma continue to silence opinions they deem unacceptable even when the testimony of company officials in the EU Parliament. 

“This removed the entire legal basis for the covert passport. The COVID passport that led to massive institutional discrimination as people lost access to essential parts of society. I find this to be shocking, even criminal,” Roos added.

During the hearing, when asked by Ross if the Pfizer COVID vaccine tested on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market, Janine Small responded while smiling:

“Regarding the question around did we know about stopping immunization before it entered the market? No. We have to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.”

Lead Stories goes on to say, “As your email to us indicates, you are of course free to advocate that testing the effect of a vaccine on transmission should happen before it enters the market, possibly even before testing for safety and efficacy in preventing the disease has been completed.  What our fact check objects to is the false implication (or in the case of the headline even the explicit claim) that such studies “never” happened in this case.”

And there you have it.  They “object” to our implication.  And that objection becomes a flag for false information.  When called out that egregious behavior, it becomes “missing context.”  And too many flags on social media mean you lose access to the platform and readers only have access to opinions that conform to acceptable viewpoints. 

Please see the entire exchange below.

From The Gateway Pundit:

Hello.

 A recent ‘fact check” by Lead Stories is being used to flag one of our social media posts as “False Information.”

We assert that this flag was posted erroneously as the basis of the “fact check” is focused on a premise that was not part of our story.

You have now changed it to “missing context” which is still erroneous. 

 We ask that the flag is removed promptly.

 Social media post: https://www.instagram.com/p/CjlVsEPO5EB/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y%3D

 Video: https://twitter.com/Rob_Roos/status/1579759795225198593?s=20&t=3nbULPQh8er9SEi4bDNG-g

 Fact-check: https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/10/fact-check-pfizer-covid19-vaccine-clinical-trial-not-intended-to-test-effect-on-transmission.html

The Gateway Pundit article did not assert that testing for transmission was part of the clinical trials.  

That was not the point of our article.  As long as Pfizer admitted that it was not tested for stopping the transmission then why did they advertise that it would prevent the transmission in the first place?

 According to the “fact check” , “In short, the trials that tested the safety and efficacy of the vaccine were not designed to test transmission in part because the trial size and duration would have needed to be larger and longer and the goal was to prevent deaths.”

That is exactly our point as Lead Stories reveals…. Small clearly admitted that they did not test the Pfizer Covid vaccine on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market.

The Lead Stories assertion, that clinical trials do not check for transmissibility, is also false.

“Pfizer, based in New York City and maker of another leading COVID-19 vaccine, says that it will start swabbing participants every two weeks in vaccine trials taking place in the United States and Argentina, to see whether the shot can prevent infection,” according to an article published on February 2021 at Nature, two months after the Pfizer vaccine was authorized for emergency use. 

Isn’t this a clinical trial?

Lead Stories also mentions that the vaccine’s ability to prevent transmission was assessed later in the roll-out of the vaccine, which was developed in response to a worldwide pandemic.

They can actually test for transmissibility if they want to, but they choose not to. And yet, the Pfizer COVID vaccine was marketed with the claim that it would stop the spread of the virus.

On November 09, 2020, one month before the first COVID vaccine was made available under EUA, Pfizer released a news release claiming the vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection  the first interim efficacy analysis from Phase 3 study.

“Today is a great day for science and humanity. The first set of results from our Phase 3 COVID-19 vaccine trial provides the initial evidence of our vaccine’s ability to prevent COVID-19,” said Dr. Albert Bourla, Pfizer Chairman and CEO. “We are reaching this critical milestone in our vaccine development program at a time when the world needs it most with infection rates setting new records, hospitals nearing over-capacity, and economies struggling to reopen.

“The first interim analysis of our global Phase 3 study provides evidence that a vaccine may effectively prevent COVID-19. This is a victory for innovation, science and a global collaborative effort,” said Prof. Ugur Sahin, BioNTech co-founder and CEO.

Whether or not efficacy of the vaccine against transmission was part of the trials was not the focus of our article.  Our focus was on Pfizer ‘s admission it was not tested for stopping the transmission yet they were  advertising that it would prevent the transmission. 

Madison, we will be reporting on the change from false to missing context and we would like to include a statement from you in our article.  We will be posting the report tomorrow, please respond with your statement to be included in our article by 10 am eastern.

Please let me know any additional questions,

Thank you.

The initial “False” rating was based on people sharing the Instagram image of the headline of The Gateway Pundit’s article, which claimed preventing transmission was “never” tested.  As the link from February 2021 which The Gateway Pundit sent us proves, studies looking at transmission were already taking place only a short while after the clinical trial and the granting of the FDA emergency use authorisation in December 2020 so this is obviously false. 

 

A later revision of the rating also took into account the caption of the Instagram post, which contradicts this headline and says the statement was about tests done “before it entered the market”.

 

That brought down the rating to “Missing Context”, mainly because the Instagram image and caption left out any mention of the studies that were carried out about transmission after the clinical trial (which were already being written about in the media in February 2021) and making it sound like something was “admitted” or “advertised” about transmission by Pfizer solely on the basis of the clinical trial (which was not set up and not presented as testing anything related to transmission, the purpose was to test safety and the ability to prevent people from becoming ill with Covid-19).

 

Note that the FDA EUA already said this about the clinical trial results in December 2020: “At this time, data are not available to make a determination about how long the vaccine will provide protection, nor is there evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person.” so this is not new information.  But ignoring any research carried out after this statement was made paints a grossly incomplete picture.

 

To date The Gateway Pundit has not provided any evidence of Pfizer “advertising” anything based on claimed effectiveness against transmission supposedly found during the clinical trial. The Pfizer news release that The Gateway Pundit provided to us was from November 2020 and spoke of “initial results” from the clinical trial regarding the effectiveness of “preventing Covid-19”.  It does not contain the words “spread”, “transmit”, “transmission” or “transmissibility”.

 

A video clip embedded on the website of The Gateway Pundit claiming to show various statements urging people to “take the vaccine to stop the transmission” only appears to contain statements that were made after some of the studies concerning transmission already published their initial results and none of the statements refer to Pfizer’s clinical trial.

 

As your email to us indicates, you are of course free to advocate that testing the effect of a vaccine on transmission should happen before it enters the market, possibly even before testing for safety and efficacy in preventing the disease has been completed.  What our fact check objects to is the false implication (or in the case of the headline even the explicit claim) that such studies “never” happened in this case.