Last Updated on January 5, 2022
New data shows that 78% of Germans who contracted the Omicron variant with a known vaccine status were fully vaccinated or boosted, much to the chagrin of fact checkers who are now struggling to explain away this unfortunate majority.
National File recently reported on a small sample of data released by the German government which found 96% of those affected by the Omicron variant were “fully vaccinated people,” including triple vaccinated people, while unvaccinated people remained largely unscathed by the newly discovered strain. National File published its article on December 30, 2021, and the Robert Koch Institute claimed this was an error in early 2022.
This week, Germany updated their data. The latest data at the time of reporting shows that over three quarters of Omicron patients whose vaccine status is known were vaccinated.
Now, Facebook’s “fact-checking” opinion bloggers can’t seem to accept the definition of “majority.”
As of January 4, 2022, the Robert Koch Institute now now claims it made an error in its original release. It has released more accurate data, and is waiting for more to be compiled.
The latest available data reveals that 78% of individuals who contracted COVID-19 with a known vaccination status were fully vaccinated. This is down from the government’s original estimate of 96%.
This would have meant that 186 people out of the 4,206 had not been vaccinated.
Today, the RKI claims that number was actually 1,097, which would mean that instead of 96%, the actual number is 78%.
The news was predictably seized upon by Facebook’s fact checking partner Lead Stories, which used its power to denounce the original number and anyone who repeated it, while simultaneously saying that 78% in no way constitutes a majority.
Lead Stories is a “fact-checking” organization Facebook utilizes to offer opinion-based judgements on fact-based articles. Facebook, now Meta, recently admitted this in court to avoid a lawsuit from veteran journalist John Stossel.
As 78 is greater than 51, the team of C+ math students at National File sees fit to judge this as a clear and overwhelming majority. Lead Stories disagrees.
“The number of infections among the unvaccinated had not been updated in the report template from a previous version, listing 186 when the correct tally was 1,097. In some articles that used the RKI report to claim vaccines are not effective against the omicron variant, the percentage of vaccinated patients among infection cases has since been updated to 78.6%,” wrote the supposed “fact checkers” at Lead Stories in an opinion blog post.
However, Lead Stories complained about the 78.6% number because the German government “did not offer reliable data on how well the COVID-19 vaccines protect against the omicron variant.”
Unfortunately for the “fact-checkers” at Lead Stories, the findings were released by a German federal government agency and research institute responsible for disease control and prevention, which some readers may choose to trust instead of them.
The findings were ostensibly released by the experts to better inform the public of the status of COVID-19, particularly the Omicron variant.
Despite the updated RKI report, which shows that over 78% of German Omicron patients were vaccinated, Lead Stories insists this does not show a “majority” because the “vaccination status was unknown for 51%”of cases.
Then, Lead Stories admitted that, in cases where vaccination status is known, the majority were in vaccinated people.
“According to the report, vaccination status was unknown for 51% of the cases where the omicron variant was detected,” Lead Stories wrote. “Of the 5,117 cases for which the vaccination status was known, 4,020 were fully vaccinated and of those, 1,137 had received a third dose,” emphasis added by National File.
Lead Stories appears to be, in effect, using word games to defend the COVID-19 vaccines from the Omicron variant.
This type of behavior could be explained by recent arguments made by lawyers for Facebook – now called Meta, apparently – who admitted that their partnered “fact-checkers,” like Lead Stories, are merely offering a third party “opinion” about the contents of the articles they purportedly fact check, and therefore the big tech company should be immune from defamation.
If anyone should be dragged into court, Facebook argued, it should be individual fact checking websites like Lead Stories and Science Feed Back, who fact checked Stossel.
Still, one might assume they would have a hard time suing someone for their opinion.
Facebook argued that the ability of Lead Stories and other fact checkers to redirect the traffic from an article with a fake news designation is merely an opinion label, as well.
Mark Sidney, the publisher of popular Facebook pages and a political blog, told National File about this incentive structure in January of 2020.
“Any time they fact check an article, Facebook adds a disclaimer that allows the fact checker to obtain the reach and distribution of the original content and redirect the traffic to their site,” Sidney told National File, “Which sustains itself off ad revenue based off the amount of traffic that they receive.”
“Facebook is perhaps inadvertently creating a moral hazard where fact checkers, including Lead Stories, are incentivized to be overzealous.” (READ MORE: Facebook Hires Ex-CNN Journalist to Fact Check Your Memes)
An even more shocking admission by Lead Stories was that when “the vaccination rate increases, the likelihood increases that there are infection cases among the vaccinated population.”
Germany claims that 90% of its population has been vaccinated.
However, Germany continues to experience spikes in case numbers that rival – and sometimes exceed- those at the start of the pandemic, long before the controversial vaccine injections were developed and made available to the public.
It remains unclear how this would be accurate if the COVID-19 vaccines were able to prevent the spread of the virus, as was initially advertised by politicians, powerful corporations, scientific experts, and health officials.
“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” Joe Biden said during a CNN Town Hall in July 2021.
Many medical experts, including the head of the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), have since blatantly told Americans that they should not expect a vaccine to protect them from contracting COVID-19.
Instead, the experts offer seemingly as consolation, those who are vaccinated should expect relatively less severe COVID-19 symptoms should the contract the virus.
