YAHOO! NEWS, WASHINGTON — The top public health authorities in the Biden administration denounced misinformation about the coronavirus vaccines following an anti-vaccine rally in Washington, D.C., over the weekend and a falsehood-laden segment on Fox News on Tuesday night that has been widely shared on social media.
“You can’t walk away from the facts. And the facts are stunningly obvious,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said at a White House pandemic response team briefing in answer to a question about the Fox News segment.
The segment had aired during Tucker Carlson’s nightly program the evening before and which the Washington Post promptly labeled as the anchor’s “most dishonest and dangerous pandemic segment yet.”
Carlson is the most-watched news anchor in the nation, and he has used his program to discredit vaccines, masks and other measures related to the pandemic.
That message appears to resonate with the conservatives who constitute his audience; Americans with right-leaning political views are less likely to take the pandemic seriously than are liberals. They are also less likely to be vaccinated.
On Tuesday evening, Carlson’s guest was Alex Berenson, a former New York Times journalist who has become a crusader against vaccination.
Berenson has been banned from Twitter for spreading untruths and has been branded “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man” by the Atlantic magazine.
Fox News, though, remains a safe space for his opinions, despite the fact that the network has a vaccine mandate in place for its employees.
During his appearance, Berenson challenged the efficacy and safety of mRNA vaccines, so called because they use a “messenger” molecule.
The vaccines manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna both use mRNA biotechnology; they constitute the majority of doses administered in the United States, followed by the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which confers immunity through a different method.
Other than being linked to a rare heart condition that afflicts younger men, the mRNA vaccines have been shown to be safe … SOURCE.
