Fox News claims Covid vaccines may not work at all, and Biden isn't telling you

What do you do with a TV network that is literally getting people killed?

John Aravosis

Apr 14, 2021

Just when you thought that Fox News couldn’t go any lower, last night Fox host Tucker Carlson suggested that:

Covid vaccines — all of them — may not even work at all;
President Biden knows they don’t work;
The vaccines might actually be really dangerous; and
Biden is hiding the truth from the American people.

Yes — another day, another Fox News lie that could get a lot of people killed.

Before I dive into this, here’s Carlson spewing his latest deadly conspiracy theory, and here’s Dr. Fauci’s response.

First, Carlson:

“In its story about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine this morning, Axios reported the Biden administration is worried that halting distribution of the shot might encourage ‘vaccine hesitancy,’” Carlson declared. “In other words, don’t tell them it’s dangerous, they might not take it. That doesn’t reassure anyone.”
Adding that this leads to the question of whether “it is effective” and “does it work,” the Fox News star asserted that public health officials are no longer “telling you how effective it is” and are, in fact, “they are telling you the opposite.”
“Does that tell us that he believes the vaccine is ineffective?” Carlson rhetorically asked. “He seems to think that. Here he is telling you that once you get the vaccine, you are still not allowed to eat or drink indoors at restaurants. Your life can't really change at all.”
….
“Experts say it is not entirely clear when it will be considered okay for people who are fully vaccinated to stop wearing masks,” he stated. “At some point, no one is asking this but everyone should be, what is this about? If vaccines work, why are vaccinated people still banned from living normal lives? Honestly, what's the answer to that, it doesn't make any sense at all!”
Carlson continued: “If the vaccine is effective, there’s no reason for people who’ve received a vaccine to wear masks or avoid physical contact. So maybe it doesn’t work and they’re simply not telling you that. Well, you’d hate to think that especially if you’ve gotten two shots but what’s the other potential explanation? We can’t think of one.”

You can read Carlson’s entire monologue here. It’s far worse than even the excerpt I quoted above. Among other things, Carlson claims that Dr. Fauci and President Biden are covering up the true number of people “hurt” by the Johnson & Johnson vaccine:

Now, Fauci has declared that because the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has injured six people — which, if true, would make that vaccine much safer not just than birth control pills, but safer than many other vaccines we’ve distributed in the past — because this vaccine has hurt six people out of seven million, we need to stop using it immediately. Does that make sense to you? No, it really doesn’t. It seems possible there’s a lot more going on here.
It’s possible this vaccine is more dangerous than they’re indicating it is. Federal officials appeared to acknowledge that today. They noted that it's easy for physicians to miss the connection between the vaccine and the blood disorder it can cause. That may be happening.

And here’s Dr. Fauci’s response:

Lis Power @LisPower1

Fauci on Tucker Carlson's vaccine comments: That's just a typical crazy conspiracy theory ... I don't have any idea what he's talking about Berman: How dangerous is it for him to speculate like that? Fauci: It's counter to protecting the safety and health of the American public

Fox News has been around since the 1990s, and they’ve always been liars in the pocket of the GOP. And this isn’t the first time we’ve been concerned about whether Fox’s lies would get someone killed: The migrant “caravan” they promoted before the 2018 election, that coincided with a domestic terror attempt in which the terrorist noted the caravan, comes to mind. But last year, Fox really stepped up its lying game with the advent of the Covid pandemic.

Fox played a key role in helping spread the Coronavirus, after its hosts continually mocked and undercut masks, social distancing, the overall threat the virus posed, and then helped promote Trump’s absurd unproven Covid “cures,” like hydroxychloroquine.

A few months later, Fox, along with the rest of the right-wing media infrastructure, helped foment the January 6th Insurrection by amplifying and endorsing Trump’s election fraud lies.

And now, we have Fox News basically telling people not to take the Covid vaccines, as experts fret that we may be on the verge of another large wave. (Carlson has been peddling vaccine hesitancy for months now.)

What do you do with a TV network that is literally getting people killed?

Folks like Media Matters have long-targeted Fox News’ advertisers, and a lot of them have left. Yet, Fox goes on. One thought I had was using Canadian broadcast standards rules to get Fox kicked off the air up there. It’s something we did quite effectively back in 2000, when we got “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger’s then-new TV show dropped in Canada after the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council accused her of being “abusively discriminatory on the basis of sexual orientation.”

Why not go after Fox in the same way? Not only does Fox News routinely promote discrimination against Latinos, immigrants, Muslims and more, but Canadian broadcast regulations also weigh in on matters of veracity.

More on Canada’s “false news” and defamation rules from the Library of Congress:

Canada has other laws that may be relevant to fake news that have been outlined by Canada’s Department of Justice as follows:
The hate propaganda provisions in sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code can be used to deal with false news that promotes hatred.
The defamatory libel provisions in section 300 of the Criminal Code prohibit people from knowingly publishing false information that has been designed to insult or that is likely to harm the reputation of someone.
Federal regulations such as section 8(1) of the Broadcasting Distribution Regulations prohibit radio and television broadcasters from broadcasting false or misleading news and abusive comments that are likely to expose persons to hatred based on listed grounds.
Some provincial laws, such as section 14 of Saskatchewan’s Human Rights Code, prohibit publications that are likely to expose groups to hatred.
Some provincial laws provide civil means to deal with libel of racial, religious or other groups (for example, section 19 of Manitoba’s Defamation Act).
Various codes of practice direct certain professionals not to propagate false news or hate propaganda (for example, the Canadian Association of Journalists’ Ethics Guidelines).
Federal broadcasting regulations issued under the Broadcasting Act[12] that deal with false or misleading news include the following:
section 8(1)(d) of the Broadcasting Distribution Regulations;
section 3(d) of the Radio Regulations, 1986; [and]
section 5(1)(d) of the Television Broadcasting Regulations, 1987[.]
Generally “these provisions prohibit licensees of radio and television programming undertakings and broadcasting distribution undertakings from broadcasting programs that contain false or misleading news.”