WorldNetDaily is maddeningly inconsistent on which of the many false and misleading claims it publishes on its website it chooses to correct. In his May 19 column, Sean Harshey declared that “The Great Coronavirus Panic of 2020 is increasingly being revealed to have been the greatest partisan political scam in history,” claiming that the reaction to the pandemic was a ploy to destroy President Trump. In the midst of that, Harshey huffed that “the CDC admitted that calculations used to compile COVID death rates were improperly inflated due to hospitals counting COVID deaths to include cases where a patient died from some other cause, such as a heart attack. The unhinged attacks by liberals on President Trump and conservatives based on COVID death counts were manufactured propaganda.”
Four days later, WND attached a lengthy correction to Harshey column:
CORRECTION May 23, 2021, at 11:14 a.m. ET: A statement in the below commentary has been fact-checked by HealthFeedback and found to be misinterpreted. The statement in question is:
“Also this week, the CDC admitted that calculations used to compile COVID death rates were improperly inflated due to hospitals counting COVID deaths to include cases where a patient died from some other cause, such as a heart attack.”
The fact-check found that the U.S. CDC director didn’t state that COVID-19 deaths were over-counted, but that her statements about deaths among vaccine breakthrough cases were misinterpreted. HealthFeedback noted: “U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Rochelle Walensky declared in May 2021 that hospitals are reporting cases of COVID-19 infections in people who have been fully vaccinated, which are known as breakthrough cases. Some of these cases resulted in deaths, which may have been due to COVID-19 or other causes, like heart attack. Only cases in which COVID-19 was the immediate cause of death or did initiate the chain of events leading to the death are counted as deaths by COVID-19, according to CDC guidelines.”
By contrast, WND has let numerous lies about the pandemic and the election stand uncorrected. And Harshey’s own March 3 column counterfactually claiming that Antifa was responsible for the Trump-supporter-led Jan. 6 Capitol riot hasn’t been corrected.
Interestingly, Harshey appears to have stopped writing for WND; his weekly column of May 26 is the last one published. Somehow we doubt that shame over getting something wrong played any sort of role in this.