The flexible rules of the Pay Check Protection Program have enabled virtually any small business or enterprise in America to qualify for a government-backed relief loan. Citizens and activist groups criticized thousands of recipients they considered unworthy, including wealthy lawyers, politicians and political lobbyists, publicly traded companies and businesses under government investigation.
Now, a advocacy group that fights online misinformation is drawing attention to a group of loan recipients that it finds worrying: anti-vaccine activists.
Six organizations that challenged vaccine safety and made claims that scientists called false, received loans that together amount to more than $ 1.1 million, according to data from the Small Business Administration, which runs the program. (The data was released last month under a court order, in response to a lawsuit filed by The New York Times and other news organizations.)
The groups that received the loans are Children’s Health Defense, founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; the Free and Informed Consent Action Network; the National Vaccine Information Center; Mercola.com Health Resources and Mercola Consulting Services, both affiliated with prominent vaccine skeptic Joseph Mercola; and Tenpenny Integrative Medical Center, a medical practice run by Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, a doctor and author who opposes vaccines.
The loans, which were made by banks and supported by the government, ranged in size from $ 72,500 for Dr. Tenpenny’s medical center to $ 335,000 for Mercola.com. They do not appear to violate Small Business Administration rules: PPP loans were widely available to any small business or non-profit organization (usually those with 500 or fewer workers) willing to certify that “the current economic uncertainty makes this loan application necessary” to support your ongoing operations.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a London-based advocacy group, discovered the loans and alerted The Washington Post, which first reported on them. Imran Ahmed, the group’s chief executive, called “bananas” the fact that such groups are eligible for taxpayer-funded aid money.
“There is an anomaly here,” said Ahmed. “PPP was necessary to deal with Covid’s economic shock, and antivaxxers fundamentally inhibit our ability to defeat Covid and overcome it.”
Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center in Sterling, Virginia, said via email that her group applied for the loan “when it became apparent that blocks and restrictions of social distance directly threatened job security for several of our employees and committed to the ongoing rent of our central office in Virginia. “The group used the loan to retain all of its 21 workers, she said.
Ms. Fisher contested the notion that her group is anti-vaccine. The organization “does not make recommendations for the use of vaccines and encourages everyone to learn about the risks and complications of infectious diseases and vaccines,” she said.
The Paycheck Protection Program distributed $ 523 billion to more than five million small businesses from April to August to help them withstand the strikes and other economic shocks caused by the coronavirus pandemic. As long as the beneficiaries use most of the money to pay their workers and comply with other rules, the loans can be fully forgiven and paid back by the United States government.