Elon Musk Turns Over Twitter Records To Key Source Of COVID Misinformation

Posted By TheNewsCommenter: From Huffpost.com: “Elon Musk Turns Over Twitter Records To Key Source Of COVID Misinformation”. Below is an excerpt from the article.

Twitter owner Elon Musk turned over access to internal company documents to a top source of vaccine misinformation who’s been giving out bunk public health advice for years, the latest in a far-right shift on one of the most influential social media sites in the world.

Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter — whom The Atlantic called “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man” in 2021 — published a Substack article Monday as part of the so-called “Twitter Files,” or Musk’s effort to turn over certain internal Twitter records to select writers and journalists.

Berenson has been frequently and flagrantly wrong about the pandemic. For example, he questioned in October 2020 why anyone would believe a prediction of 500,000 U.S. COVID deaths by the following spring — only for the death toll to pass that number by February, and then double it by May 2022.

But worse than simply being wrong, he has, on several occasions, presented misleading information about vaccines to his readers. In one telling example, Berenson in November 2021 cited British mortality data for people aged 10-59 and wrote, “Vaccinated English adults under 60 are dying at twice the rate of unvaccinated people the same age … I don’t know how to explain this other than vaccine-caused mortality.” Within eight days, according to Berenson, the link to his post had been shared 800,000 times, and screenshots had been spread by the millions around the web. But he was wrong, and dramatically so.

Fact-checkers and British officials identified his fundamental misunderstanding: Berenson had written “age” but was referring to an age range, lumping together everyone aged 10-59. Older Brits in that range had been prioritized for the vaccine, so more of them were vaccinated than the younger people. And older people, vaccinated and not, are generally more likely to die than younger people. As a spokesperson for the British Office for National Statistics told PolitiFact, “Vaccinated people are more likely to be older and unvaccinated people more likely to be younger, therefore increasing the all-cause mortality rates for the vaccinated.”

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