FULL CLAIM: “COVID Deaths Have Been Vastly Overcounted”; “Most COVID Deaths Likely Due to Ventilator Malpractice”; “Hospital Incentives Are Driving up COVID Deaths”
On 1 March 2022, The Epoch Times published a piece by Joseph Mercola, the biggest purveyor of anti-vaccine disinformation according to a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, where he claimed that COVID-19 “deaths have been vastly overcounted”. Mercola, who has made a career for himself by promoting unproven and unapproved health products, went on to claim that COVID-19 “primarily killed those close to death anyway”, that “most COVID deaths [were] likely due to ventilator malpractice”, and that hospitals were incentivized to drive up COVID deaths. As we’ll show below, all of these claims are inaccurate and were previously fact-checked by Health Feedback and other fact-checking organizations.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Health Feedback has reviewed multiple false claims that COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths were inflated (see here, here, here, here and here). In reality, public health experts believe that COVID-19 numbers are undercounted. In the U.S., for instance, using excess deaths in 2020 and 2021 experts estimate that the true number of COVID-19 deaths may be 20% higher than the official number of over 962 thousand reported COVID-19 deaths as of 10 March 2022. And in India a scientific study published in Science by a...
Russian military command has been lying for the fifth month in a row about battlefield “successes,” claiming that Russian forces are advancing west of Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region. However, this...