COVID AND THE VACCINE - TRUTH, LIES, AND MISCONCEPTIONS REVEALED, page-69144

Interesting case. Old vs new media.

• COVID-Narrative Dissenters File Antitrust Action Against Legacy Media (ET)

A coalition of outspoken critics and skeptics of the mainstream narratives on COVID-19 has brought an antitrust lawsuit against some of the world’s largest news organizations, accusing them of working in collaboration to suppress dissenting voices surrounding the pandemic. The lawsuit (pdf), filed on Tuesday in a federal court in Texas, targets The Washington Post, the British Broadcasting Corp (BBC), The Associated Press (AP), and Reuters—all of which are members of the “Trusted News Initiative (TNI),” a self-described “industry partnership” formed in 2020 among legacy media giants and big tech companies.

“By their own admission, members of the TNI have agreed to work together, and have in fact worked together, to exclude from the world’s dominant internet platforms rival news publishers who engage in reporting that challenges and competes with TNI members’ reporting on certain issues relating to COVID-19 and U.S. politics,” the complaint reads. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a critic of the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccination policies, led the lawsuit. He is joined by Creative Destruction Media, Trial Site News, Truth About Vaccines founders Ty and Charlene Bollinger, independent journalist Ben Swann, Health Nut News publisher Erin Elizabeth Finn, Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft, Dr. Joseph Mercola, and Ben Tapper, a chiropractor.

The plaintiffs, the lawsuit alleges, are among the many victims of the TNI’s “group boycott” tactic, defined as a coordinated effort to facilitate monopoly by cutting off the competitors’ access to supplies and necessities. In this case, the TNI members are accused of engaging in group boycott—in concert with their big tech partners—against small, independent news publishers by denying them access to internet platforms they need to compete and even survive in the online news market. “As a result of the TNI’s group boycott, [the plaintiffs] have been censored, de-monetized, demoted, throttled, shadow-banned, and/or excluded entirely from platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Linked-In,” the lawsuit states.

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Can’t get that genie back in the bottle.

• Feds Swing Between Pushing Boosters, Fueling Vax Hesitancy (JTN)

Less than two days after FDA Commissioner Robert Califf credited bivalent COVID-19 boosters with “significant” and “clinically meaningful” reductions in hospitalization and death “in all populations examined,” his own agency gave a new boost to vaccine hesitancy. The CDC and FDA announced an “additional investigation” Friday afternoon into a possible “safety concern for ischemic stroke” in recipients of Pfizer’s bivalent who are 65 and older, even while stating twice in bold that “no change” was recommended “in vaccination practice.” They said the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink provoked their “rapid-response investigation,” which “raised a question” about whether stroke was more likely within 21 days of boosting versus 22-44 days.

The decision recalls the agencies’ recommended “pause” in Johnson & Johnson’s traditional COVID vaccine in April 2021 following six dangerous blood clots in women. While the VSD signal is “very unlikely” to represent a “true clinical risk,” the agencies said they notified the public in the interest of transparency. Their prior failure to share bivalent data is partially responsible for an unexpected wave of skeptical media coverage this month, which has questioned the effectiveness of boosters that now-outdated Omicron subvariants as well as the reliability of official statistics on COVID. Several outside vaccine advisers, including the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, told CNN Wednesday the agencies hid unfavorable results from them when they were considering whether to recommend Moderna’s bivalent booster for approval.

The U.S. is drastically overcounting COVID deaths and hospitalizations by conflating incidental infections with those that played a meaningful role, former Baltimore public health commissioner Leana Wen wrote in The Washington Post Friday. Tufts Medical Center epidemiologist Shira Doron told Wen that hospitalizations due to COVID “were as low as 10 percent of the total number reported” on some days, while attending physician Robin Dretler at Emory Decatur Hospital estimated 90% of those hospitalized with COVID are there “for some other illness.”

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