How a well-meaning U.S. government database fuels dangerous vaccine misinformation
By Melissa Goldin, John Gregory, and Kendrick McDonald
On 5/25/21 at 12:01 AM EDT
Anna Shvets/Pexels
On April 30, 2021, the website Natural News which NewsGuard has rated Red, meaning generally unreliable published a story reporting the death of a 2-year-old who in late February had received the second dose of a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine during the companies clinical trials for children. The only problem? Children under 5 did not begin receiving shots until April, according to a press releaseon the Pfizer website.
Natural News picked up the false claim from a familiar source of pandemic misinformation: Red-rated website Great Game India, which in January 2020 also spread a different falsehood that the COVID-19 virus was stolen from a Canadian lab.