The media’s most prominent “fact-checkers” remained silent on Vice President Kamala Harris’ dismissed claim that the Biden government did not inherit a plan to implant the coronavirus vaccine.
During an interview with Axios co-founder Mike Allen, who aired on HBO on Sunday, Harris was asked about the difficulties in the government’s response to the pandemic after almost a month in office.
“There was no stock … of vaccines,” Harris replied. “There was no national vaccination strategy or plan. We were leaving it up to states and local leaders to try to find out. And in many ways, we are starting from scratch on something that has been going on for almost an entire year! “
Harris directly contradicted the comments of White House adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci last month, responding to CNN reports that made a similar claim.
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“We are certainly not starting from scratch because there is activity going on in distribution,” said Fauci during a press conference at the White House.
Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post fact checker who was famous for keeping a continuous record of falsehoods made during Trump’s presidency, has yet to give his opinion on Harris’ statement.
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Over the weekend, Kessler spent much of his time checking out the facts of former President Trump’s legal team during the Senate impeachment trial. One of the allegations he tried to verify was in defense of Harris, which the Trump team criticized for promoting the Minessota Freedom Fund last year. The fact-checker insisted that the Trump lawyers’ claim that the money raised from the fund that saved the troublemakers, including repeat offenders, is “more complicated” than they suggested.
CNN’s top fact checker Daniel Dale also spent the weekend focusing on Trump’s defense team. Neither he nor the rest of the CNN fact-checking team addressed Harris’s dismissed claim.
Perhaps for Dale and CNN, however, such a fact check would be uncomfortable for them to report.
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CNN reporting that Fauci shot in the White House press room last month cited anonymous Biden officials and the anti-Trump network strongly promoted its now unmasked “scoop” in the air.
Neither CNN nor the Washington Post’s Kessler responded immediately to Fox News’s requests for comment.
Although PolitiFact was the only prominent fact checker to challenge Harris’ “wrong” statement, Axios, the news agency that the vice president made his statement, strangely verified by excluding a tweet that referred to previous comments by Fauci when sharing the clip on Twitter.
Axios also did not respond to Fox News’s request for comment.
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While fact-checkers remained silent, Harris’ falsehood echoed as true elsewhere. PBS NewsHour correspondent Yamiche Alcindor took the vice president’s word during her appearance on Monday on MSNBC.