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. Frustrated 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, the federal loan program has drawn criticism for granting loans to organizations that have challenged vaccine security.
Six organizations that made claims that scientists called fake loans received from the Check Protection Program, totaling more than $ 1.1 million, according to data from the Small Business Administration, which manages the program. The data was released last month by 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, an organization 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 doctor’s office run by Sherri Tenpenny, a physician and author whose books include “Saying no to vaccines: a resource guide for all ages”.
The loans, which were made by banks and supported by the government in an effort to prevent the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, ranged in size from $ 72,500 for Dr. Tenpenny’s medical center to $ 335,000 for Mercola.com.
The loans do not appear to violate Small Business Administration rules: Salary Protection Program loans were 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 required loan application “to support your ongoing operations. Small Business Association representatives did not answer questions about the loans.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a London-based advocacy group, discovered the loans and The Washington Post first reported on them.
“There is an anomaly here,” said Imran Ahmed, the group’s chief executive. “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 in an email that her group had applied for the loan “when it became clear that blocks and restrictions of social distance directly threatened job security for several of our employees and committed to the continuous rental of our central office in Virginia. ”The group used the loan to retain its 21 workers, she said.
Ms. Fisher contested the idea that her group is anti-vaccines. 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.
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Answers to your vaccine questions
While the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, most are likely to put medical professionals and residents of long-term care institutions first. If you want to understand how this decision is being made, this article will help you.
Life will only return to normal when society as a whole obtains sufficient protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they will only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens, at most, within the first two months. The unvaccinated majority will still remain vulnerable to infection. An increasing number of coronavirus vaccines are showing robust protection against disease. But it is also possible for people to spread the virus without even knowing they are infected, because they have only mild symptoms or none at all. Scientists are still unsure whether vaccines also block coronavirus transmission. So for now, even vaccinated people will need to wear masks, avoid crowds indoors and so on. Once enough people are vaccinated, it will be very difficult for the coronavirus to find vulnerable people to infect. Depending on how quickly we, as a society, achieve this goal, life may begin to approach something normal in the fall of 2021.
Yes, but not forever. The two vaccines that will potentially be authorized this month clearly protect people from getting sick with Covid-19. But the clinical tests that provided these results were not designed to determine whether vaccinated people could still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. This remains a possibility. We know that people naturally infected with the coronavirus can transmit it as long as they have no cough or other symptoms. Researchers will be studying this issue intensively as vaccines are launched. In the meantime, even vaccinated people will need to consider possible spreaders.
The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is given as an injection into the arm, like other typical vaccines. The injection will be no different than the one you took before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines and none have reported serious health problems. But some of them experienced short-term discomfort, including pain and flu symptoms that usually last for a day. People may need to plan a day off from work or school after the second injection. Although these experiences are not pleasant, they are a good sign: they are the result of your own immune system facing the vaccine and developing a potent response that will provide lasting immunity.
No. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use a genetic molecule to prepare the immune system. This molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse with a cell, allowing the molecule to slide inward. The cell uses mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which can stimulate the immune system. At any given time, each of our cells can contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules, which they produce to make their own proteins. After these proteins are produced, our cells fragment the mRNA with special enzymes. The mRNA molecules that our cells make can survive just a matter of minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is designed to resist the cell’s enzymes a little more, so that cells can produce extra proteins from the virus and stimulate a stronger immune response. But mRNA can only last a few days at most, before being destroyed.
Del Bigtree, the founder of the Informed Consent Action Network, also objected to being described as anti-vaccination, saying his group is opposed to “distributing products that are not properly tested”. He does not consider Covid-19 vaccines safe, he said.
The loan allowed his organization, near Austin, Texas, to keep 10 jobs, he said.
“We used the loan exactly as planned,” said Bigtree.
Several of the groups have been penalized by Facebook for making misleading claims, according to Dani Lever, a Facebook spokesman.
A page managed by Dr. Tenpenny was removed in December for violating the site’s disinformation policy, said Lever. The National Vaccine Information Center and Children’s Health Defense are prohibited from advertising on Facebook. The pages of both groups, together with the Facebook page for the Informed Consent Action Network, have been removed from Facebook’s algorithmic recommendation system, which decreases their visibility on the site.
The Payment Check Protection Program distributed $ 523 billion to more than five million small businesses from April to August to help them withstand the outages and other economic shocks caused by the pandemic. As long as beneficiaries use most of the money to pay workers and comply with other rules, loans can be fully forgiven and paid back by the United States government.
Congress recently allocated $ 284 billion to restart the program, and the hard-hit organizations – those whose sales have dropped by at least 25% since the pandemic began – are eligible for a second loan. Fisher said his group does not intend to apply for another loan.
Bigtree said he also doesn’t plan to sign up again. “Our donor base has gotten a lot stronger with this,” he said, referring to the pandemic.
The other four organizations that received assistance from the Salary Protection Program did not answer questions about their loans.
Two of the groups received loans early in the program, when funding was limited and vulnerable small businesses struggled to break the lines that often prioritized wealthy, well-connected candidates.
Tenpenny Integrative Medical Center obtained a loan on April 11 from KeyBank, and the National Vaccine Information Center received one four days after the Northwest Federal Credit Union. None of the creditors responded to a request for comment.
Ahmed’s group recently published a report on an October online meeting organized by the National Vaccine Information Center to discuss the coronavirus pandemic. Speakers at the event, including Kennedy and Tenpenny, described the Covid-19 crisis as an opportunity to expand the ranks of vaccine skeptics, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate report.
These efforts come while the United States government is working to persuade those who doubt that coronavirus vaccines are safe and effective. Some frontline workers in hospitals and nursing homes refused to be vaccinated.
Congress created the Payment Check Protection Program in late March as part of the CARES Act. The program’s rules were hastily written and frequently revised, and the relief effort drew strong criticism from lawmakers and others for distributing money unevenly and unfairly in ways that did not direct the money to the most needy recipients.
Loans to three of the vaccine’s critics – Children’s Health Defense, the Informed Consent Action Network and Mercola.com – were made in May by JPMorgan Chase. A bank spokeswoman declined to comment on the loans. Another lender, PNC, declined to comment on its loan to Mercola Consulting Services in late April.