Check your facts before fact-checkers do

Mainstream outlets are looking for any reason to discredit vaccine skeptics. Don't fall into the trap of reporting before verifying.

I’ve steered clear away from social media for most of my life, much to the chagrin of my friends. I generally don’t like how social media operates, or the behaviors it encourages. It most certainly reduces the ability to have an open and engaging discourse.

But a few months after I started this Substack I decided to make a Twitter account to promote myself- until I was removed for going against Twitter’s TOS.

In my short time on the platform I was rather vocal about my criticisms of the vaccines.

Well, maybe not as blatant as others, but apparently noting that I had a Substack writing about the COVID vaccines led a journalist from a mainstream outlet to reach out to ask for an interview.

Now, at the time I hardly had any subscribers, so I found this really strange and never responded to this person.

I can’t verify if the person was with the outlet that they mentioned, but it alerted me to the fact that mainstream outlets see avenues such as Substack as being entirely antagonistic to their old school model of journalism. More importantly, they also view Substack as a hivemind for bad ideas such as “anti-vaxxer conspiracies”, leading these outlets to criticize the money that has flown into Substack by way of these supposed conspiracies. Thus, if Substack can be made to look bad the mainstream press can come out looking far better, and retain some of their supposed “credentials”.

My point is that we as independent journalists have an eye on all of us, always watching to see what so-called conspiracies take shape, or what information may be misrepresented.

People should be aware that, for as popular as Substack has become, it still likely pales in comparison to views that the mainstream press get. In that regard, the power dynamics here aren’t entirely within our favor.

With the implementation of Notes and more attention being brought to Substack, the serious question of censorship has been raised with serious uncertainty to what may come to this platform in the future.

All that being said, what this tells us is that much of what we disseminate on Substack may be picked up by the mainstream press and used to discredit any arguments against the vaccines or COVID policies.

On one hand, this isn’t a big deal as free dissemination of any form of information should be encouraged. On the other hand, this can lead to trouble when the information we present is heavily misinterpreted or even sometimes flat-out wrong.

This creates fodder for fact-checkers who already have serious issues of misrepresenting people’s positions. But as much as we raise criticisms against fact-checkers, many still consider them to be aboveboard and take their words at face value.

In essence, when poor information gets disseminated via Substack “fact-checkers” can easily pick up on these issues and broadcast them to a larger viewer-base, making vaccine skeptics seem psychotic or completely incapable of reading scientific literature.

We essentially feed the beasts that work to undermine our positions by not doing work to make sure the evidence we put forth has some bearing in reality.

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For instance, right now there’s a lot of discourse happening as it relates to mRNA vaccines getting into the food supply.

On the surface, this seems like the next step in vaccine technology, and in that regard such a feat would be rather concerning.

However, such a model requires some proof of concept and feasibility.

Let’s suppose that we breakdown mRNA vaccines based on the vaccinees. In livestock the model isn’t too far-fetched. In fact, we know that this model has feasibility because hundreds of millions of people have gotten the BioNTech or Moderna COVID mRNA vaccines.

This suggests that, as a model, the translation over to cows or chickens wouldn’t be entirely out of the realm of possibility. Now, whether this will spell disaster for us in the future is a different story. The lack of long-term safety data, and even data relating to the longevity of mRNA or spike in the body warrants real concerns about what mRNA vaccines would do us as consumers if we were to each mRNA-vaccinated animals.

I won’t speculate on the uncertainties in the food chain, but as an animal model mRNA vaccines have been proven to be feasible- safe and effective is another story.

But now compare that idea with plants. How exactly would you get mRNA vaccines into plants? This model doesn’t translate over well into lettuce or tomatoes, and here the model falls apart.

Most reviews cited for plant-based vaccines, such as the Saxena, J., & Rawat, S. review, have looked at inserting the antigen in question into a plant such as a potato and having the plant express the antigen.

This, by no ways, is an mRNA vaccine, and rather I would argue is more akin to a GMO product as the plants in such reviews are transgenic by way of the antigen insertion.

This creates a problem of consistency, in that the examples that are used aren’t indicative of the argument being raised.

I should not that I am not stating that mRNA vaccines in plants may not occur, but so far there appears to be a clear lack of proof of concept, and to speculate on such matters requires that one propose a model with some degree of feasibility.

And yet, many people have covered taken to alarming people of mRNA vaccine in food, with some of these arguments lacking nuance. But more egregiously, several people have taken to conflating any vaccine with mRNA vaccines.

Recently, Snopes “fact-checked” the discourse on mRNA food, giving the whole story a giant big FALSE.

Again, I tend to find that fact-checkers misrepresent information and strawman people’s positions more than checking actual facts at times.

But even if that’s the case, it’s always important to see what your critics think of you. In this case, it’s better to know why fact-checkers consider these remarks false rather than dismissing these fact-checks outright.

Here, Snopes points to a Tik Tok video in which someone shows a video of “mRNA vaccines” being produced in plants, and using this as an argument that this is what’s happening to our food supply.

There’s a lot going on here, and there are many points in which mRNA vaccines aren’t explicitly being suggested, but rather that vaccines will be getting into our food supply by way of produce (although the giant “mRNA nano tech” sticker doesn’t help but add to the noise and confusion).

The video cites the review from Saxena, J., & Rawat, S.¹ for some of the produce being used as vaccines, but remember that these plants are transgenic (the gene is inserted into their genome), and the widespread feasibility of this product has yet to come to fruition. Thus, it would be improper to use this review as an example of mRNA vaccines in food.

In quoting Snopes, these fact-checkers have raised these points of contentions:

For example, in the viral TikTok, an ominous-sounding narrator explains that "the genetic editing of plants to contain edible vaccines is well underway. Work is being done with bananas, potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce, rice, wheat, soybeans, and corn." The narrator cites the company Medicago as an example of a company involved in such work. 

Using Medicago as an example of an edible vaccine, as myriad anti-vaccine websites have, is misguided for several reasons — most notably the fact that their product was an injected vaccine and in no way edible. The confusion stems from the fact that this company produced its active ingredient with genetically modified plants, but the final product saw that active ingredient extracted and purified into a more traditional vaccine. 

Using Medicago as an example of mRNA technology is equally problematic, as Medicago's product in no way utilized or contained mRNA. Medicago's aim was to produce a Virus Like Particle (VLP) vaccine — one that introduces materials that mimic portions of a virus to train the immune system to fight the actual virus. 

A few posts back I made the point of arguing that so-called “bad people” may still have sound hypotheticals or ideas. In that post I used remarks from the EPA as an example, in which case the EPA suggested that dioxins weren’t tested in East Palestine after the train derailment because primary combustion products were tested, which and suggested to be at low/negligible levels. Even though the EPA should have still conducted dioxin testing regardless, this model isn’t inherently wrong- one wouldn’t expect trace combustion products such as dioxin if the larger products don’t appear to be at highly elevated levels (of course, the caveat being that this is based on the EPA’s own air monitoring results which can still be considered questionable)?

Thus, I can argue that Snopes and other fact-checking outlets have serious problems. HOWEVER, it doesn’t mean that everything that they state is wholly incorrect.

Here, it’s true that Medicago’s vaccine production is in no ways an mRNA vaccine platform. Rather, it appears that Medicago is using bacteria to transfect genetic material into plants. This genetic material appears to include everything but the components that would lead to production and storage of a viral genome. Essentially, Medicago is leading plants to produce husks of viral particles (termed virus-like particles).

Thus, if Medicago is being used as an example of mRNA vaccines in plants then it’s a completely incorrect argument, the same way that the review from Saxena, J., & Rawat, S. discusses transgenic plants (GMOs) and not mRNA vaccine-based plants as well.

Now, the caveat here may be that plants as vaccines as a whole may be rather concerning.

The only problem is that this is a completely different argument.

It’s one thing to argue that they are putting mRNA vaccines into plants, it’s another to say that plants may be used for any vaccines (a more broad assumption).

Here, I leave room that the Tik Tok user may be referring to vaccines in food more broadly, but it’s important to remember that these ideas can’t be used interchangeably. You can’t state that mRNA vaccine technology is making their way into plants while then stating that you are speaking more broadly about plants. I’m not saying that this is what the Tik Tok user is doing, but it’s certainly true that fact checkers will jump onto any inconsistencies in an argument if possible.

And unfortunately, this now leaves room for outlets such as Snopes to look at these remarks an interpret them in a way that is not favorable to the position that one is presenting, and in this case this may lead people to look at vaccine skeptics as being more unscientific.

But it also speaks to the fact that there appears to be a growing issue in figuring out how much information is being both retained and applied by readers in an appropriate manner. In this case, it appears that people may be more inclined for narratives and evidence that supports one’s own worldview more than examining information with an open mind. The fact that “mRNA vaccine” gets thrown around without any restraint suggests that people may not have an understanding of what mRNA is, and why the mRNA within the vaccines aren’t the same as the mRNA found naturally.

Keep in mind that anyone should be able to make any claims that they wish, but when there’s room for misinterpretation and incorrect statements critics, whether through good-faith or bad-faith (usually bad-faith) will clasp onto whatever they can to discredit people.

But I’d like to hear what you all think. Note that Snopes makes a fallacy in arguing against mRNA vaccines in meat. The lack of a mRNA vaccines being used in livestock doesn’t mean that this may be the direction that agriculturalists and vaccine manufacturers take in the future. In this case, the argument is somewhat disingenuous of Snopes.

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1. Saxena, J., & Rawat, S. (2013). Edible Vaccines. Advances in Biotechnology, 207–226. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1554-7_12