Fauci and Gates have ties to Moderna despite “fact check” headline claiming otherwise
09/27/2020 / By Cassie B.
Last week, an article was published on USA Today with the headline: “Fact check: Fauci, Gates, Epstein and Soros have no ties to drug company Moderna.” However, independent journalist Jeremy R. Hammond has done some fact checking of his own on the piece and found that its claims simply do not hold water.
In fact, Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates both have ties to Moderna, the drug company working on the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.
USA Today correctly reports that a video that was widely distributed on social media is inaccurate in claiming Fauci was the first CEO of Moderna. Nevertheless. Fauci, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) Director and White House coronavirus task force member, does indeed have ties to the company.
And although their headline also claims that Bill Gates has no ties to Moderna, the truth is that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is actually listed as a Moderna collaborator on the company’s own page at investor website Flagship Pioneering.
According to Hammond, a quick search reveals the lies in the USA Today article. A page published on the NIAID’s own website announcing the launch of Moderna’s phase 1 COVID 19-vaccine trial says that Fauci’s NIAID was funding the trial. The vaccine was also reportedly developed by scientists from the NIAID and their collaborators, and the page quotes Dr. Fauci as calling the trial “an important step” in the quest for a safe vaccine for COVID-19.
In addition, Hammond says he immediately found proof on Moderna’s website of the Bill Gates connection, where it lists the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as a “strategic collaborator.” It also says the foundation entered into an agreement with them to develop mRNA vaccines for different infectious diseases.
After a bit of back and forth, Hammond was able to convince fact check writer Chelsey Cox to make the headline less misleading – although it is still not quite perfect. He pointed out that the article itself even says Gates has ties to Moderna, so the headline claiming he doesn’t is quite clearly false and needed to be corrected.
Cox ultimately said that she was changing the headline to “Fact check: Moderna post makes false claims about Fauci, Gates, Soros, Epstein.” Although this does make it sound like it was Moderna who was spreading information, it at least matches the article’s content (and the truth) better than the previous headline.
Of course, USA Today never bothered to publish an acknowledgement of their error, nor did they update the piece to point out that Fauci is indeed partnered with Moderna.
It’s not the first time a “fact check” has needed a fact check of its own; a Facebook “fact check” falsely claimed that a YouTube video’s central claim that a WHO scientist blatantly lied to the masses about vaccine safety wasn’t true when it turned out that the scientist did actually lie to the public about it.
The mainstream media is up to its usual tricks
Unfortunately, this is nothing new for the mainstream media. The fact that the usual lies are actually being published as a “fact check” is what makes this particular article so maddening. In their quest to “debunk” stories from alternative sources, the truth is often overlooked in favor of making their competition look bad.
One way we can fight against this problem is by spreading truthful information that the mainstream media is trying to keep out of public knowledge. When you read a high-quality article with verifiable and useful information that you haven’t seen in the mainstream media, make a point of sharing it and getting the word out.
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