Politico, Axios, and NBC News peddle a weird smear of Clarence Thomas

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accurately reported the medical facts behind a moral objection to COVID-19 vaccines. Multiple reporters and at least three outlets twisted his words so as to falsely “fact check” him Thursday morning on some claim he never made.

By Friday morning, neither NBC News nor Axios had corrected their error, and the authors’ and outlets’ false or misleading tweets remained on display. The whole incident is a perfect example of how much of the liberal media live in a liberal echo chamber and are willing to abandon standards and believe anything that makes pro-lifers look bad.

Adam Edelman and Aria Bendix at NBC News spread the lie, and so did Oriana Gonzalez at Axios. Politico wrote about it too. Here are the very misleading tweets:

and

All three of these tweets (and some of the headlines and story leads) are so distorted as to be false smears.

Axios stated directly in its “Reality Check” what it was implying in its headline and tweet: “No coronavirus vaccine in the U.S. contains the cells of aborted fetuses.”

Politico wrote in its tweet: “No Covid vaccines in the U.S. contain the cells of aborted fetuses.”

Great. Thomas never said any vaccines contained the cells of aborted fetuses. He never cited anyone making that claim. But Axios, Politico, and NBC went out of their way to imply he did.

What Thomas said was some pro-lifers “object on religious grounds to all available COVID–19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.”

This is a 100% factually true statement. It is true both that some pro-lifers object on those grounds and that the vaccines were “developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.” Science magazine, to use just one example, has written that the vaccines were “manufactured using cells derived from human fetuses electively aborted decades ago” — almost the same exact wording as Thomas.

Pfizer and Moderna, while developing the vaccines, tested them on a line of cells derived from the kidney of an aborted Dutch baby. Johnson & Johnson used a cell line derived from a different aborted baby not in the testing, but in the manufacture of the vaccine. The cells derived from the baby aren’t in the vaccine, but the cells act as something of a catalyst for a crucial ingredient (the adenovirus) in the J&J vaccine.

Thomas didn’t claim that the cells of aborted children are in the vaccines, but NBC News, Politico, and Axios all wrote as if he did. They were dead wrong on an easily checkable fact.

How did this happen? How did three outlets all “fact check” a claim Thomas never made, implying or stating that he did make it?

First off, this shows that NBC News reporters Edelman and Bendix, along with Axios reporter Gonzalez, lack familiarity with the pro-life arguments they wrote about. The use of these abortion-derived two cell lines in the development of the COVID-19 vaccines has been a topic of debate and discussion for over 18 months.

It’s not surprising that Edelman, Bendix, and Gonzalez don’t personally care about abortion-derived cell lines, but it’s unfortunate that reporters writing about pro-life objections to vaccines are clearly 100% unfamiliar with these facts.

Secondly, the incident suggests that some in the media haven’t yet learned to stop following Mark Joseph Stern.

Here was Stern’s tweet that came shortly before those three stories.

Stern actually doesn’t say anything false, he just weirdly writes that “Thomas claims that COVID vaccines were developed with the use of ‘aborted children,’” a “claim” that is literally true.

The tweet went viral, and uninformed Twitter liberals reacted the way you’d expect.

The surprising thing is the reporters reacted the same way and rushed their misleading or false stories, stories that misrepresented what Thomas wrote and ignored how the drugs were developed, to print without checking.