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PolitiFact Shamelessly Covering for Left-Wing Politicians, Not Rigorously Fact-Checking

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Chooses tangent fact to “check” leftist’s claim
PolitiFact continues to deceptively pose as a “fact checking” 
organization
Author Miriam Valverde chooses a red herring in order to promote 
Jayapal’s claim
Oversimplification and superficial investigation destroy the 
credibility of this fact check
OUR RATING: #FakeNews. This is what you’d expect on CNN playing 
to an empty airport.

Indicted Outlet: Miriam Valverde | PolitiFact | Link | Archive

The common refrain from conservatives is that fact check 
organizations hyper-scrutinize the political right, while 
providing cover to the political left. One way they do this is 
by not addressing central claims, and another is by rating 
something “true” when it is not the central claim of the speaker.

PolitiFact shows, once again, that it is a highly unprofessional 
website that seeks to legitimize or delegitimize who they 
choose. Miriam Valverde’s fact check is oversimplified, 
unprofessional, and obtuse to the point of laughability. 
PolitiFact should find writers who can recognize the claims 
worthy of being fact checked, rather than focusing on red 
herrings.

Major Violations:

Fake Fact Check
Oversimplification
Superficial Investigation
Willfully Ignorant
Irrelevant
Valverde’s fact check concerns Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s statement 
about the cost of a hospital stay from COVID:

“’The average hospital stay for a case of COVID-19 costs about 
$17,064. The vaccine is free,’ said Jayapal in her Aug. 30 
Instagram post.”

Jayapal was promoting the vaccine when she made this statement. 
However, instead of addressing the truth of the obvious 
implication — that a vaccine will keep you from getting an 
exorbitant hospital bill — Valverde humorously focuses on 
whether or not the hospital bill would actually be $17,064. She 
determines that Jayapal’s statement is mostly true on the basis 
of medical providers, insurance companies, and FAIR Health.

This is Valverde’s primary journalistic failure. She remains 
willfully ignorant to the obvious implications and instead 
spends paragraphs writing about the estimated cost to get care 
for COVID.

The obvious implication for Jayapal’s statement is that the 
COVID vaccine will prevent you from getting COVID and thus 
needing to go to the hospital.

The number of breakthrough cases, now well documented and 
regularly occurring, is a significant problem in Jayapal’s 
statement.

Valverde oversimplifies the statement so that she can conduct a 
superficial investigation whereby she bestows legitimacy on 
Jayapal’s claims. Nowhere is it mentioned that even those who 
have been vaccinated have had to go to the hospital due to 
coronavirus.

This is Valverde’s second error. Rather than report on vaccine 
effectiveness, which is the true heart of the matter in 
Jayapal’s statement, Valverde ignores the data that would cast 
doubt.

Israel, who has vaccinated 78% of its adult population, has had 
a number of cases in which vaccinated people have gotten 
coronavirus [1] [2]. How does Jayapal account for them? What 
about their bills?

According to reporter Benedict Brook:

“Israel, the poster child for vaccination, recorded more new 
Covid-19 infections on Wednesday than at the peak of its second 
wave when few in the country of nine million were even 
jabbed…The nation – wholly dependent on Pfizer – has a rolling 
average of 9300 daily cases. Where it once broke vaccination 
records, Israel has now broken a grim new record – the country 
with the highest seven day average of new cases per million.”

Here’s just a few more uncomfortable facts left out of this 
“fact check.” According to the Boston Herald [3]:

“More than 4,000 fully vaccinated people in Massachusetts tested 
positive for the coronavirus last week, a daily average of more 
than 600 people as breakthrough infections continue to rise each 
week amid the delta variant.”

The case in Gibraltar is even more shocking than Israel’s 
situation [4] :

“??The nation of Gibraltar, which achieved a 99 percent vaccine 
compliance rate as of June 1, is now seeing an astounding spike 
in cases…The number of COVID cases per day have increased by an 
astounding 2500 percent since June 1, in the latest bit of 
evidence that the vaccine regime is not all it’s cracked up to 
be.”

According to one source in the New York Intelligencer, the data 
about breakthrough cases is not totally transparent [5]:

“‘The breakthrough problem is much more concerning than what our 
public officials have transmitted,” [Scripps’s Eric Topol said]. 
‘We have no good tracking. But every indicator I have suggests 
that there’s a lot more under the radar than is being told to 
the public so far, which is unfortunate.’ The result, he said, 
was a widening gap between the messaging from public-health 
authorities and the meaning of the data emerging in real time. 
‘I think the problem we have is people — whether it’s the CDC or 
the people that are doing the briefings — their big concern is, 
they just want to get vaccinations up. And they don’t want to 
punch any holes in the story about vaccines. But we can handle 
the truth. And that’s what we should be getting.’”

This reveals a larger hole in Valverde’s fact check. Did she not 
look into the credibility of claims about vaccination efficacy? 
Nope. She focused on how much it would cost to get treated for 
coronavirus, which was obviously not the relevant factual claim 
Jayapal was making.

Given these statistics, Jayapal’s claim is false because it is 
misleading. Those who are vaccinated, even if it was free, may 
still have to go to the hospital to be treated for coronavirus. 
What then, Rep. Jayapal? This is the question Valverde should 
have asked, but didn’t.

Journalistic rigor requires skill and intelligence in pointing 
out the implications of statements and examining the truth of 
those implications. Instead, Valverde side steps in order to 
make the claim that Jayapal’s statement was true.

OUR RATING: #FakeNews. This is what you’d expect on CNN playing 
to an empty airport.

Bibliography:

1] https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global/israel-
fighting-record-breaking-surge-in-covid19-cases-despite-high-
levels-of-vaccination/news-story/3445287a9c46e8712574da2316bd3ee1
2] https://twitter.com/drsimonegold/status/1433579996589670425
3] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/massachusetts-
coronavirus-breakthrough-cases-jump-4415-last-week-more-than-600-
fully-vaccinated-people-a-day/ar-AAOckJ2
4]

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/fully-vaxxed-gibraltar-sees-2500-
percent-spike-in-covid-19-cases-per-day-initiates-new-
lockdowns/amp/
5] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/breakthrough-covid-19-
cases-may-be-a-bigger-problem.html

https://tgpfactcheck.com/politifact-shamelessly-covering-for-
left-wing-politicians-not-rigorously-fact-checking/

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