PolitiGnatStraining No. 573: Is natural immunity really a vaccination?

PolitiFact truly never ceases to amaze us with its forays into free interpretation of political claims. Perhaps President Trump deserves some of the credit for driving PolitiFact mad via Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Would you believe that Mr. Trump believes that immunity acquired through recovery from the coronavirus counts as a "vaccine"?

That's where PolitiFact went on Dec. 15, 2020:

This analysis will take some doing, because PolitiFact's fact check contains multiple layers of fact check lunacy.

First, we need to see what Trump actually said. PolitiFact covers that adequately in the fact check:

"You develop immunity over a period of time, and I hear we’re close to 15%. I’m hearing that, and that is terrific. That’s a very powerful vaccine in itself," said Trump, who was responding to a reporter’s question about what his message to the American people was as the holidays approach and levels of COVID cases in the U.S. continue to rise.

Immediately after, the fact check runs off the rails at about a 90 degree angle:

It wasn’t the first time Trump had given credence to the idea that if enough people in a population gain immunity to a disease by being exposed to it, the illness won’t be able to spread through the remainder of the population — a concept known as "herd immunity."

Assuming PolitiFact and fact checker Victoria Knight did not seek to deliberately mislead their readers, this looks like a likely case of confirmation bias. Knight and PolitiFact were looking for Trump to say something false and interpreted Trump's claim to create the falsehood they sought. Otherwise, it's a mystery how anyone could interpret Trump's claim as they did.

First, Trump is pretty obviously talking about natural immunity as a metaphorical vaccination. Natural immunity is not entirely unlike immunity acquired via a human-devised vaccination. We would hope that even liberal bloggers working as non-partisan fact-checking journalists would know about figures of speech such as metaphors.

Second, why take the 15 percent plateau as the notion Trump was comparing to a vaccine instead of the concept of naturally acquired immunity? We can't imagine a reason apart from either confirmation bias or premeditated deceit. Naturally acquired immunity has approximately the same role in achieving herd immunity as a vaccine. Both confer immunity, and both would contribute toward a population's potential for herd immunity. If that was Trump's point, as seems to reasonably be the case, he's right.

How does a mainstream fact checker get so far off course so quickly? And why isn't everybody blowing the whistle on this kind of fact-check shenanigan?

As for PolitiFact, it keeps chugging along on one of the sharpest tangents ever devised:

However, experts have warned that attempting to achieve herd immunity naturally, by allowing people to get sick with COVID-19, could result in more than a million deaths and potentially long-term health problems for many. A better way to achieve protection across the population, experts say, is through widespread vaccination.

Why do Knight and PolitiFact think this paragraph has any relevant relationship to Trump's claim? Do they suppose Trump calling natural immunity a "powerful vaccine in itself" represents an intent to change policy to forgo the use of man-made vaccines and seek to combat the virus with natural immunity alone?

This is fact-checking gone insane. The paragraph doesn't belong. PolitiFact could have talked about the role natural immunity plays in achieving herd immunity. Readers could benefit from that explanation. But they get hardly any of that explanation from PolitiFact. Instead, they get railroaded down PolitiFact's branching tree of tangent:

So, we thought it was important to check whether 15% is anywhere close to the herd immunity threshold, and whether this level of natural immunity could be considered "as powerful as a vaccine."

So PolitiFact fact checks whether Trump is right that 15 percent natural immunity could confer herd immunity, even though that really has nothing to do with what Trump said. And where does that "as powerful as a vaccine" line come from? PolitiFact puts it within quotation marks, as though it is quoting Mr. Trump. Is it supposed to be something Trump said?

It's not in the transcript of Trump's remarks that PolitiFact linked. And our Google search using "Trump" AND "as powerful as a vaccine" did nothing to encourage us to believe the quotation came from Trump.

Remember, a team of editors supposedly reviews each PolitiFact fact check. Apparently each of them gave some sort of okay to this dumpster fire of a fact check.

The PolitiFact team overlooked an obvious use of metaphor and then went circus clown on a balloon to turn Trump's claim into something it wanted to fact check.

Fact checkers decide not to check facts in fact check of Bernie Sanders

As a near-perfect follow up to our post about progressives ragging on PolitiFact over its centrist bias, we present this Jan. 15, 2020 PolitiFact fact check of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders:

Sanders said his plan would "end" $100 billion in health care industry profits, and PolitiFact plants a "True" Truth-O-Meter graphic just to the right of that claim.

But there's no fact check here of whether Sanders' plan would end $100 billion in profits. Instead the fact check looks at whether the health care industry makes $100 billion in profits (bold emphasis added):

The Sanders campaign shared its math, and it’s comprehensive.

The $100 billion total comes from adding the 2018 net revenues -- as disclosed by the companies -- for 10 pharmaceutical companies and 10 companies that work in health insurance.

We redid the numbers. Sanders is correct: The total net revenues, or profits, these companies posted in 2018 comes to just more than $100 billion - $100.96 billion, in fact. We also spoke to three independent health economists, who all told us that the math checks out.

There are a couple of wrinkles to consider. Some of the companies included -- Johnson & Johnson, for instance -- do more than just health care. Those other services likely affect their bottom lines.

But more importantly, $100 billion is likely an underestimate, experts told us.

It looks to us like PolitiFact meticulously double-checked equations that did not adequately address the issue of health care profits.

On the one hand "We redid the numbers. Sanders is correct." But on the other hand "$100 billion is likely an underestimate."

The fact checkers are telling us Sanders was accurate but probably wrong.

But we've only covered a premise of Sanders' claim. The meat of the claim stems from Sanders saying he will "end" those profits.

Did Sanders mean he would cut $100 billion in profit or simply reduce profits by some unspecified amount? We don't see how a serious fact-check effort can proceed without somehow addressing that question.

PolitiFact proceeds to try to prove us wrong (bold emphasis added):

Sanders suggested that Medicare for All would "end" the $100 billion per year profits reaped by the health care industry.

The proposal would certainly give Washington the power to do that.

"If you had Medicare for All, you have a single payer that would be paying lower prices," Meara said.

That means lower prices and profits for pharmaceuticals, lower margins for insurers and lower prices for hospitals and health systems.

That could bring tradeoffs: for instance, fewer people choosing to practice medicine. But, Meara noted, the number supports Sanders’ larger thesis. "There’s room to pay less."

Though PolitiFact showed no inclination to pin down Sanders' meaning, the expert PolitiFact cited (professor of health economics Ellen Meara) translates Sanders' point as "There's room to pay less."

Do the fact checkers care how much less? Is PolitiFact actually fact-checking whether Sanders' plan would lower profit margins and it doesn't matter by how much?

Side note: PolitiFact's expert donates politically to Democrats. PolitiFact doesn't think you need to know that. PolitiFact is also supposedly a champion of transparency.

Where's the Fact Check?

PolitiFact does not know how much, if at all, the Sanders plan would cut profit margins.

PolitiFact does not specify how it interprets Sanders' claim of bringing an "end" to $100 billion in profits (the cited expert expects a lower profit margin but offers no estimate).

The bulk of the fact check is a journalistic hole. It fails to offer any kind of serious estimate of how much the Sanders' plan might trim profits. If the plan trims profits down to $75 billion, presumably PolitiFact would count that as ending $100 billion in profits.

Using that slippery understanding, quite a few outcomes could count as ending $100 billion in profits. But how many prospective voters think Sanders is promising to save consumers that $100 billion?

"Fact-checking."

That's no "centrist bias." That's doing Sanders a huge favor. It's liberal bias, the prevalent species at PolitiFact.

PolitiFact gives "policy trajectory" a "False" rating

Earlier this week PolitiFact Executive Director Aaron Sharockman said PolitiFact does not rate opinions or predictions.

Also this week, PolitiFact Health Check, the PolitiFact partnership with Kaiser Health News, apparently contradicted Sharockman's claim.

Behold:

If it looks like PolitiFact is fact-checking a prediction, that's because PolitiFact is fact-checking a prediction.

More than one of PolitiFact's pool of four experts apparently saw it exactly that way (bold emphasis added):

But, Adler said, the structure of Trump’s claim — promising what his administration "will" do, rather than commenting on what it has done — leaves open the possibility of taking other steps to keep preexisting condition protections in place.

That’s true, other experts acknowledged. So far, the White House has postponed a legislative push until after the 2020 election — leaving a vacuum if the courts do wipe out the health law.

History shows that PolitiFact will not allow mere expert opinion to stand in the way of the hoped-for narrative. When experts offer opinions that do not fit comfortably with PolitiFact's conclusion, PolitiFact ignores them.

Hilariously, PolitiFact's conclusion uses language strongly suggesting an awareness that it is rating a prediction:

Our ruling

Trump said his administration will "always protect patients with preexisting conditions."

The White House’s policy trajectory does exactly the opposite.

What is "policy trajectory" if it is not a projection of what will happen tomorrow based on Trump administration policy today?

PolitiFact Health Check is not fact-checking Trump. It is rating a pledged policy position. PolitiFact could potentially address such cases with an expansion of its ratings of executive promises ("Trump-O-Meter" etc.).

But this so-called "fact check" makes Sharockman a liar if it isn't corrected somehow.