WND Writer Makes Even More Bogus COVID Claims

As much as we hate to pile on WorldNetDaily writer Art Moore, he has been a fake-news machine on the issue of coronavirus. And another one of the articles in which he falsely claimed that an article promoting ivermectin had been published in a journal that rejected it has other bogus claims as well.

The main thrust of Moore’s May 10 article was to tout an interview Fox News’ Tucker Carlson did with Dr. Peter McCullough, an aggressive promoter of questionable treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, in which he attacked COVID vaccines, claimed thousands of people have died from them, and insisted that immunity obtained from having coronavirus is better:

He insisted it’s a “false narrative that you can get the infection twice.”

After 17 years, people who had the first SARS virus are still immune, and that virus is about 80% the same as the current SARS virus. And of the 111 million people in the world believed to have had COVID-19,  there have been only about 100 cases of claimed reinfection.

But in nearly every case of claimed reinfection, McCullough said, it’s turned out to be a misintrepretation of a PCR test, which commonly delivers false positives.

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All of the vaccines produce a viral spike protein that is pathogenic and can cause blood clotting and damage blood vessels, he explained.

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Noting the risk the vaccines pose to COVID-recovered people, he said a clinical diagonosis of COVID-19 should be enough to confirm immunity.

“I hope some rational thinking comes down in America to say, Listen, proof of having COVID or proof of being a survivor recovered will be good enough,” he said.

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People say: “Oh, there are studies out of Denmark where there were some ambient antibodies here and people got COVID here. You must be able to get reinfected.”

But those are “little red-herring cases.”

“I said, Look at your nursing homes, is grandma going in the ICU over and over again? No. Does it seem like everybody gets it one time? Yes. There’s a lack of common sense. we just have to use our clinical common sense. The immunity is robust, complete and durable. Let’s move in.”

WND has already had to walk back the bogus claim that PCR tests are prone to false positives. Meanwhile, a fact-checker has pointed out how misleading McCullough’s claims are (as well as other claims he had that Moore didn’t note):

But what McCullough didn’t tell viewers is that acquiring immunity through infection comes with the risks associated with the illness. The relatively low mortality rate of COVID-19 is commonly cited as a reason not to worry about catching the virus. But this focus on mortality rate alone doesn’t account for the fact that the virus is highly contagious, and can therefore still cause many deaths when it spreads widely. To date, more than 590,000 people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19, while COVID-19 deaths worldwide have exceeded 3.6 million.

Furthermore, COVID-19 can lead to other outcomes besides complete recovery and death. For example, a proportion of COVID-19 survivors have persistent health problems even after recovering from the infection. Some of these problems include difficulty breathing, cognitive deficits, joint and muscle pain. This condition is termed long COVID.

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As explained above, natural infection does produce protective immunity in most cases, but reinfection can and does happen. This suggests that not all survivors develop protective immunity from infection alone. It’s unclear how many COVID-19 survivors experience reinfection, as there isn’t enough data to make conclusions, although reinfection is thought to be uncommon.

Vaccination can help enhance COVID-19 survivors’ protective immunity. Firstly, vaccine boosters designed to target variants can further improve the immune system’s ability to respond to an infection by a variant, as Cassandra Berry, a professor of immunology at Murdoch University, explained in this article published by The Conversation.

Secondly, reinfection is difficult to predict, but individual variability in immunity can arise due to factors such as genetic susceptibility, age, and the amount of virus a person was exposed to (also known as infectious dose). Since vaccines are designed to produce optimal immunity, as Berry explained, vaccination can help to bridge the immunity gap in a survivor that didn’t generate protective immunity from infection alone.

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Overall, McCullough’s claim that vaccine-induced spike protein poses a danger to people isn’t substantiated by evidence. In fact, the available evidence contradicts his claim.

Don’t look for Moore to correct his article — it has already served its purpose of instilling fear into WND readers. And it’s clear that for Moore, pushing the right-wing talking point du jour is more important than basic fact-checking.