PolitiFact's 'Fact-Check' That Biden and Harris 'Distrusted' the Vaccines Is Really Something Else

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

PolitiFact looks like they’re at it again, trying to clean up after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

As we reported, after Joe Biden’s CNN’s town hall, Biden specifically said he wanted to eliminate guns that had the capacity to shoot 20 or more rounds, specifically naming nine-millimeter pistols and rifles. But Politifact said that the GOP was wrong to say he wanted to ban handguns and argued that he was talking about high capacity magazine banning although he was specifically talking about the guns themselves.

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Now, they’re trying to justify what Biden and Harris actually said against the vaccines while President Donald Trump was in office. This PolitiFact “fact-check” really is something else.

They judged that this video, with clips of Biden and Harris talking, was “false” despite the fact it’s quoting exactly what they said. How did they manage to get around this?

“Video clips appear to show Joe Biden and Kamala Harris raising doubts about COVID-19 vaccines, but they were raising concerns about the rollout by then-President Donald Trump, not the vaccines themselves,” the story claims.

From Fox News:

PolitiFact contributing writer Tom Kertscher insisted the clips used in the video were “selectively edited to take the statements out of context.”

“The parts that are left out make clear that Biden and Harris were raising questions not about the vaccines themselves, but about then-President Donald Trump’s rollout of the vaccines and the risk that the effort would become rushed or politicized,” Kertscher wrote on Friday.

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This is pure sophistry. When you’re sowing doubt about the process, you are sowing doubt about the vaccines. The videos were not out of context.

So for example, here are two of the quotes, with Politifact’s added context. You tell me what any reasonable person not trying to clean up for Joe Biden would think. The bolded part is what was in the video and the rest is the added “context.”

“Well, I think that’s going to be an issue for all of us. I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump. And it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he’s talking about. I will not take his word for it. He wants us to inject bleach. I — no, I will not take his word.”

“The way he (Trump) talks about the vaccine is not particularly rational. He’s talking about it being ready, he’s going to talk about moving it quicker than the scientists think it should be moved … . People don’t believe that he’s telling the truth, therefore they’re not at all certain they’re going to take the vaccine. And one more thing: If and when the vaccine comes, it’s not likely to go through all the tests that need to be done, and the trials that are needed to be done.”

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As Newsbusters indicates, they may have left out the Trump critique, but they didn’t change the words of what was said or the context — which was to sow doubt about the vaccines if Trump was involved. Indeed, what this shows was how political their attacks really were. But it doesn’t change the fact that they were sowing doubts about the vaccines. By the way, PolitiFact? Trump never said to inject bleach. You might want to fact-check Harris on that.

According to Fox, PolitiFact has done only 13 fact-checks on Biden in his first 100 days, 106 others ‘defending’ him.

But no bias here.

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