WND Dishonestly Covers Anti-Vaxx Rally, Censors Offensive Statement By Speaker RFK Jr.

WorldNetDaily’s Art Moore used a Jan. 21 article to deceptively tease an upcoming protest rally:

Drs. Robert Malone and Peter McCullough will join Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and many other opponents of COVID-19 vaccine mandates at a rally at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., this Sunday.

The event, Defeat the Mandates, will begin at 11:30 a.m. at the Washington Monument with a march to the Lincoln Memorial.

But Malone, McCullough and Kennedy aren’t just opponents of vaccine mandates — they’re opponents of COVID vaccines, period. Moore is falsely soft-pedaling the underlying purpose of the protest.

Reporting on the protest itself two days later, Joe Kovacs found a way to be completely dishonest in noting Kennedy’s remarks:

Despite frigid temperatures, thousands of Americans showed up Sunday on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to voice strong opposition to COVID-vaccine mandates.

“Every time you comply, you get weaker,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a featured speaker at the “Defeat the Mandates” event. “Every time you say ‘yes,’ you’re getting pushed back to a weaker position.”

“The hill that you’re going to die on is the hill you’re on right now,” he said, “and they’re coming for our children.”

Kennedy hammered the companies that manufacture the experimental vaccines being mandated in many locations worldwide, with no legal liability.

“You think they found Jesus suddenly … and they’re suddenly concerned with public health?” he said. “These are the companies that gave us the opioid crisis. These are not good citizens, these are criminal enterprises.”

He warned of what he called “turnkey totalitarianism,” as dark powers look “to control every aspect of behavior.”

“Today the mechanisms are being put in place so none of us can run and none of us can hide,” Kennedy said, warning of efforts to cut off the food supply.

Kovacs is lying by calling the vaccines “experimental” — the fact that both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have received full government approval discredits that talking point. But more disturbingly, Kovacs censored the fact that Kennedy made an offensive Nazi comparison in that speech. As a more reliable news outlet reported:

At a rally against vaccine mandates in Washington, DC, on Sunday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likened vaccine policies in the US to the actions of a totalitarian state, even suggesting Anne Frank was in a better situation when she was hiding from the Nazis.

“Even in Hitler Germany (sic), you could, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did,” said Kennedy, a prominent anti-vaccine advocate, in a speech at the Lincoln Memorial. “I visited, in 1962, East Germany with my father and met people who had climbed the wall and escaped, so it was possible. Many died, true, but it was possible.”

Kennedy’s historically inaccurate anti-Semitic remark ignores the fact that Frank and some 6 million other Jews were murdered by Nazis. Frank, who was a teenager at the time, hid in an attic in the Netherlands, not Germany, before she was caught and was sent to a concentration camp, where she died.

It’s unknown why Kovacs didn’t consider that wildly inflammatory statement to be unworthy of mention — perhaps because he knew it discredited him, and WND has an interest in keeping Kennedy viable as an anti-vaxxer. Indeed, back in November, Moore lavished an article on Kennedy misusing VAERS statistics to falsely claim that, in Moore’s words, “the COVID-19 vaccines are deadlier than all vaccines combined over the past 30 years.” 

And since Kovacs didn’t report the original statement, WND certainly did not report that Kennedy was shamed into semi-apologizing for it a couple days later. Kovacs did, at least, tacitly concede that the rally was really against the vaccines, not the mandates:

Kennedy was joined by doctors who have been censored by Big Tech as they warn of the dangers of the COVID shots. 

Among them was Dr. Robert Malone, one of the developers of the technology being used in today’s vaccines.

“These vaccines do not prevent omicron infection,” Malone declared. “These products cannot achieve herd immunity and stop COVID.”

“They are not completely safe and the full impact of their use remains unknown.””The dark winter predicted by our president and pushed by the fear-mongers in our media, is failing to materialize,” he continued.

He also did notte on of the crazier speakers in passing: “Rizza Islam, an author and minister for the Nation of Islam, said the devil is behind the current madness, saying ‘Satan [is] the one who has obviously declared war on all humanity.'”But Kovacs didn’t question why the anti-vaxxers he loves so much is hanging out with a member of the Nation of Islam, which WND is normally quick to attack as far-left radicals (and black ones at that).

Kovacs also refused to report just how extreme the crowd was, so we hae to turn to a more reliable news outlet for that:

The marchers carried posters and flags that included false statements such as “Vaccines are mass kill bio weapons” and “Trump won.” A bus was parked beside the Washington Monument, wrapped in “Arrest or Exile” signs and displaying pictures of Anthony S. Fauci, Bill Gates and Jacob Rothschild — the last an echo of antisemitic conspiracy theories involving the Rothschild family.

[…]

As speakers took to the stage — including a group of doctors in white coats — the crowd roared its approval at lines comparing vaccine mandates to the actions of authoritarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and the former Soviet Union and railing against the news media for its reporting on the scientific evidence supporting the coronavirus vaccines. 

The protesters also harassed employees at area restaurants, refusing to wear masks to enter in violation of city policy.

It could be that Kovacs agrees with many of these extreme views, so he didn’t see them as newsworthy. But overall, WND’s shoddy, hole-filled coverage of the rally shows why nobody trusts WND as a “news” source.