PolitiFact has it both ways on 'vaccination'

 PolitiFact's July 30, 2021 fact check confirming as "Mostly True" that Gen. George Washington "mandated smallpox vaccines for the Continental Army" surprised us.

It surprised us because is was barely six months (Dec. 15, 2020) ago that PolitiFact effectively told us that immunity acquired from having COVID-19 did not count as any sort of vaccine.

In December 2020, President Donald J. Trump said (bold emphasis added):

I think that the vaccine was our goal. That was number one because that was the way — that was the way it ends. Plus, you do have an immunity. You develop immunity over a period of time, and I hear we’re close to 15 percent. I’m hearing that, and that is terrific. That’s a very powerful vaccine in itself."

For some reason, PolitiFact concluded Trump was saying 15 percent natural immunity could confer herd immunity. But Trump was obviously saying that immunity acquired via means other than the new vaccines would contribute toward herd immunity. PolitiFact gave the impression that claim was false, basically by suggesting natural immunity doesn't count as a vaccine:

Is 15% natural immunity among the American population anywhere close to a "powerful vaccine," as Trump alleges? 

No, said the experts. And there’s nothing "terrific" about that level of infection within the community.

We doubt the experts were primarily at fault for misinterpreting Trump's statement, by the way. PolitiFact likely insinuated its misleading narrative in the questions it posed to its chosen list of experts.

PolitiFact's July 2021 fact check reversed on viewing naturally acquired immunity as a vaccine.

The smallpox vaccine didn’t exist when Washington was commander in chief of the Continental Army, but the point remains: he ordered the inoculation of troops against smallpox by the means that was then available, variolation.

So, even though vaccines were not invented until after the Revolutionary War, PolitiFact found it "Mostly True" that Washington mandated vaccinations for the Continental Army.

Variolation, by the way, simply meant intentionally infecting people with smallpox. It was the same virus, but tended to cause less severe illness

It's just another reminder that PolitiFact "fact checks" largely count as subjective exercises.


Note: We also wrote about the fact check of Trump back in January 2021.

Note 2: We doubt scientists have a solid idea why variolation was effective.

Story Focus Shenanigans

We've pointed out for years that PolitiFact's story focus often determines the "Truth-O-Meter" rating at the end. Story focus shenanigans never go out of style at PolitiFact.

PolitiFact's method allows its fact checkers any number of ways to approach the same claim. A fact checker might focus on what the claimant said was meant. Or the fact checker could focus on how an audience might perceive the claim. One approach might lead to one "Truth-O-Meter" rating and another approach to a different "Truth-O-Meter" rating. There's no good evidence of any objective criteria guiding the process.

That brings us to two timely examples that help illustrate the phenomenon.

"Mostly False" for the Republican

President Biden set policy to allow essential workers who are undocumented to receive coronavirus vaccines. Why is Scalise's statement "Mostly False"? Apparently because American citizens who are not among the first groups eligible for the vaccine are not waiting to get the vaccine:

But, we wondered, does allowing this population access to the vaccine mean they are being invited to step in front of American citizens in the queue?

PolitiFact weasel-words "in the queue" so that Americans in low priority vaccine eligibility groups are not in the queue at all and are thus not skipped over when undocumented immigrants join those in the high priority groups.

You're not waiting for the vaccine if you're not in that narrowly-defined queue. PolitiFact quoted a Scalise spokesperson who explained his meaning. To no avail. Scalise received a "Mostly False" rating even though his statement was literally true taken in context, with "in the queue" encompassing all American citizens awaiting the vaccine.

"Half True" for the Democrat

Hocus-pocus-story-focus.

Pointedly, PolitiFact does not look at all the ways Mr. Biden's claim fails the test of truth. It does mention some of them, but breezes past such technicalities to point out that IF the person making below $15 per hour is the sole breadwinner in a family of four AND/OR lives in an area with high living expenses THEN they would fall below the poverty level.

How many of those earning less than $15 per hour meet those conditions? Well, if that was important then PolitiFact would have given us a number. Obviously it's not important. What we need to know is that under some conditions Biden's statement could be true. Those missing conditions count as missing context and that matches PolitiFact's definition of "Half True"!

Marvel at PolitiFact's rationalization:

A spokesman for Biden said he was referring to a family of four with one full-time income using the federal government’s poverty guideline, an explanation Biden didn’t include in the interview. Using that measurement, that family with a paycheck of $13 an hour would live below the poverty line. At $15 an hour, the same family would clearly be above the poverty line. So Biden was off by about a dollar, using the existing standards.

But experts said wages alone don’t tell the full story about whether a household lives in poverty. Other factors include child care and housing costs, for example, which can vary by geography. Generalizing a "poverty wage" to a specific number ignores the different circumstances that families face. Other experts said the federal definition of a poverty level is out of date and needs changing.

We rate this claim Half True.

You wonder why similar reasoning couldn't justify a "Half True" for Scalise?

Why do you hate science?

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.