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AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storylettersMitch McConnell’s Motive: Self-InterestA reader writes that the majority leader acknowledged Joe Biden’s victory to ensure his hold on power. Also: A simple inauguration for Joe Biden; a CD collection to savor.Dec. 16, 2020More from our inbox:Biden’s Inauguration: Keep It SimpleMy CDs Tell a Life Story  Credit…Pool photo by Caroline BrehmanTo the Editor:Re “Senate Leader Seeks to Avoid Vote Challenge” (front page, Dec. 16):For the sake of this nation and its great experiment in democracy, I am elated by Tuesday’s acknowledgment by Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, of Joe Biden’s legitimate win and his status as our president-elect.Yet Americans must not be fooled by what just happened. The senator from Kentucky acted in complete and utter self-interest.Had Donald Trump succeeded in delegitimizing the presidential election or in simply maintaining his sham with active or tacit congressional support, our entire democracy and its foundational system of elections by the people would be forever called into question, including the status going forward of every newly elected or re-elected senator and representative.Do not misunderstand where Mitch McConnell’s loyalty ultimately lies. It is to power itself and his own and his party’s hold on it.Marian CohnNew YorkBiden’s Inauguration: Keep It Simple  Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesTo the Editor:On Jan. 20, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt “dispensed with the traditional ceremony on the Capitol steps, as well as the marching bands, fancy floats and hundreds of thousands of guests” and took the oath of office at the White House to start his fourth term, Doris Kearns Goodwin writes in her book “No Ordinary Time.” The war was far from won. It was a time of crisis.Joe Biden, assuming the presidency amid another crisis, should do likewise. America does not need another mass gathering, another superspreader event. Let Mr. Biden take office quietly with the nation his witness via television. A quiet inauguration will be a signal of a new era, a meaningful start to a united effort to combat the coronavirus and revive the economy it has shattered.Donald Trump need not attend.Mike FeinsilberWashingtonTo the Editor:Unfortunately, when the inauguration takes place, Covid-19 will still be with us. I suggest that President-elect Joe Biden start bragging about the smallest Inauguration Day crowd ever.Ira CureBrooklynMy CDs Tell a Life Story Credit…Javier JaénTo the Editor:“My CDs Aren’t Going Anywhere,” by Anthony Tommasini (Critic’s Notebook, Dec. 10), reminded me of how meaningful collecting CDs has been to me. I always seem to remember when and why I bought every CD I own and exactly where they live on my shelves. They are deeply personal time-markers and carry stories that transcend the music itself.I have some signed by my favorite artists. There are CDs I bought for my birthday or to listen to at Christmastime. Others I bought because I was learning a piece of music and needed a good reference or just because the music seemed interesting.I hope that CDs never disappear. They conjure old memories and the expectation of new ones. I will keep buying them at every opportunity.Jose Luis HernandezTulsa, Okla.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyIt Took Mitch McConnell Six WeeksWith its surreal defiance, the Republican Party has established a new normal for anti-democratic behavior.Opinion ColumnistDec. 16, 2020Electors in Georgia turning in their official ballots on Monday.Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesEarly this week, electors in 50 states and Washington, D.C., formally chose Joe Biden as the next president of the United States.And after weeks (and weeks) of waiting, Republicans in the Senate began to acknowledge the president-elect’s victory.“We’ve now gone through the constitutional process and the electors have voted, so there’s a president-elect,” Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, who is the chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, said.“The Electoral College has cast their votes and selected Joe Biden,” said a notably enthusiastic Senator Mike Braun of Indiana. “Legislatures and courts have not found evidence of voter fraud to overturn the results.”“At some point you have to face the music,” Senator John Thune of South Dakota said. “And I think once the Electoral College settles the issue today, it’s time for everybody to move on.” Similarly, Senator John Cornyn of Texas let us know that he thinks Biden is “president-elect subject to whatever additional litigation is ongoing. I’m not aware of any.”It is refreshing to see Republican lawmakers finally yield to reality. Still, there’s something concerning about each of these statements. That something was also there in Senator Lamar Alexander’s interview with Chuck Todd of “Meet the Press” on Sunday. Asked whether he had “any doubt who won the election,” the outgoing Tennessee senator answered, “Shouldn’t be after Monday. The states have counted, certified their votes. The courts have resolved the disputes. It looks very much like the electors will vote for Joe Biden.”The “something” is the idea that this past month of litigation (and angry outbursts and demanding phone calls with election officials) was somehow normal, that the “constitutional process” for presidential elections includes potential judicial override, that the Supreme Court weighs in on challenges to the outcome, and that everything is provisional until the Electoral College cast its votes, as if that process is anything more than a formality.To affirm Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the winners of the election more than a month after the end of voting — as Mitch McConnell did, on Tuesday morning, when he announced that “our country officially has a president-elect and vice-president elect” — is to treat the outcome as unofficial pending an attempt to overturn the result.In short, Republicans are establishing a new normal for the conduct of elections, one in which a Democratic victory is suspect until proven otherwise, and where Republicans have a “constitutional right” to challenge the vote in hopes of having it thrown out.Senator Mitch McConnell congratulated President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on his victory six weeks after Election Day.Credit…Pool photo by Nicholas KammWe’ve already seen this spread to down-ballot races. Sean Parnell, a Republican House candidate, refused to concede his race against the Democratic incumbent, Conor Lamb, citing voter fraud and signed onto a lawsuit, since dismissed, to throw out mail-in ballots. “I will continue to fight and follow the constitutional process until every legal vote is counted and all legal proceedings are resolved,” he said, more than a week after Lamb declared victory.John James, the Republican candidate for the Senate in Michigan, took a similar stance. “While Senator Peters is currently ahead, I have deep concerns that millions of Michiganders may have been disenfranchised by a dishonest few who cheat,” James said, days after voting ended with the incumbent Democrat, Gary Peters ahead. James did not concede until the end of the month.One rejoinder is that Democrats have played this game too. In 2018, Stacey Abrams took 12 days to end her campaign for Georgia governor. Her opponent, Brian Kemp, had also administered the election as secretary of state. In the years before, his office had improperly purged hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls and closed polling stations in predominantly Black areas throughout the state. His was a slim victory, and Abrams held out on a concession to call attention to Kemp’s clear conflict of interest.You see, despite a record high population in Georgia, more than a million citizens found their names stripped from the rolls by the Secretary of State, including a 92 year-old civil rights activist who had cast her ballot in the same neighborhood since 1968. Tens of thousands hung in limbo, rejected due to human error and a system of suppression that had already proven its bias. The remedy, they were told, was simply to show up — only they, like thousands of others, found polling places shut down, understaffed, ill-equipped or simply unable to serve its basic function for lack of a power cord.Abrams did not dismiss the election as “rigged” because there were more voters than she would have preferred. She did not call on judges to subvert the outcome or throw out Republican votes. She admitted defeat, but refused to concede that hers was a free and fair election. Contrast that with President Trump, whose complaint is that he had to compete in a free and fair election, and whose definition of “fraud” is a level electoral playing field.Following the president’s lead, some Republicans, under the guise of so-called election integrity, are even retreating from popular government itself. After Kemp’s successor as secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, refused to bend to demands to subvert the vote for the president, the speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, David Ralston, announced that he would seek a state constitutional amendment to take the office away from voters and put it in the hands of the Georgia Legislature. His counterpart in Michigan, another swing state, has even floated his support for doing the same with presidential electors.Ongoing debates over coups and fascism and despotism, all keyed to foreign examples, miss the extent to which American history itself offers many examples of democratic backsliding — not into outright autocracy but into forms of competitive authoritarianism or herrenvolk democracy, in which only those designated as the rightful “people” have a legitimate say in government. Perhaps we should be looking less at whether the United States is on the path to authoritarianism and more at whether it’s moving away from the broad-based democratic aspirations of the postwar period back toward the narrow, restrictive democracy of the years between the end of Reconstruction and the crisis of the 1930s.Greater attention to anti-democratic moments in our history — like the spectacularly violent “redemption” of South Carolina in the 1870s or the Wilmington massacre and coup of 1898 — might leave us less surprised when one of our two major political parties recapitulates the arguments, the claims and even the methods of those in our past who sought liberty for themselves above liberty for others.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Latest Vaccine InformationU.S. Deaths Surpass 300,000F.A.Q.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Like a Hand Grasping’: Trump Appointees Describe the Crushing of the C.D.C.Kyle McGowan, a former chief of staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and his deputy, Amanda Campbell, go public on the Trump administration’s manipulation of the agency.“Every time that the science clashed with the messaging, messaging won,” said Kyle McGowan, a former chief of staff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Credit…Audra Melton for The New York TimesDec. 16, 2020Updated 9:36 a.m. ETATLANTA — Kyle McGowan, a former chief of staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and his deputy, Amanda Campbell, were installed in 2018 as two of the youngest political appointees in the history of the world’s premier public health agency, young Republicans returning to their native Georgia to dream jobs.But what they witnessed during the coronavirus pandemic this year in the C.D.C.’s leadership suite on the 12-floor headquarters here shook them: Washington’s dismissal of science, the White House’s slow suffocation of the agency’s voice, the meddling in its messages and the siphoning of its budget.In a series of interviews, the pair has decided to go public with their disillusionment: what went wrong, and what they believe needs to be done as the agency girds for what could be a yearslong project of rebuilding its credibility externally while easing ill feelings and self-doubt internally.“Everyone wants to describe the day that the light switch flipped and the C.D.C. was sidelined. It didn’t happen that way,” Mr. McGowan said. “It was more of like a hand grasping something, and it slowly closes, closes, closes, closes until you realize that, middle of the summer, it has a complete grasp on everything at the C.D.C.”Last week, the editor in chief of the C.D.C.’s flagship weekly disease outbreak reports — once considered untouchable — told House Democrats investigating political interference in the agency’s work that she was ordered to destroy an email showing Trump appointees attempting to meddle with their publication.The same day, the outlines of the C.D.C.’s future took more shape when President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced a slate of health nominees, including Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the chief of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, as the agency’s new director, a move generally greeted with enthusiasm by public health experts.“We are ready to combat this virus with science and facts,” she wrote on Twitter.Mr. McGowan and Ms. Campbell — who joined the C.D.C. in their early 30s, then left together in August — said that mantra was what was most needed after a brutal year that left the agency’s authority crippled.In November, Mr. McGowan held conversations with Biden transition officials reviewing the agency’s response to the pandemic, where he said he was candid about its failures. Among the initiatives he encouraged the new administration to plan for: reviving regular — if not daily — news briefings featuring the agency’s scientists.Mr. McGowan and Ms. Campbell, both 34, say they tried to protect their colleagues against political meddling from the White House and Department of Health and Human Services. But an agency created to protect the nation against a public health catastrophe like the coronavirus was largely stifled by the Trump administration.The White House insisted on reviewing — and often softening — the C.D.C.’s closely guarded coronavirus guidance documents, the most prominent public expression of its latest research and scientific consensus on the spread of the virus. The documents were vetted not only by the White House’s coronavirus task force but by what felt to the agency’s employees like an endless loop of political appointees across Washington.Mr. McGowan recalled a White House fixated on the economic implications of public health. He and Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the C.D.C. director, negotiated with Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, over social distancing guidelines for restaurants, as Mr. Vought argued that specific spacing recommendations would be too onerous for businesses to enforce.“It is not the C.D.C.’s role to determine the economic viability of a guidance document,” Mr. McGowan said.They compromised anyway, recommending social distancing without a reference to the typical six-foot measurement.One of Ms. Campbell’s responsibilities was helping secure approval for the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, a widely followed and otherwise apolitical guide on infectious disease renowned in the medical community. Over the summer, political appointees at the health department repeatedly asked C.D.C. officials to revise, delay and even scuttle drafts they thought could be viewed, by implication, as criticism of President Trump.“It wasn’t until something was in the M.M.W.R. that was in contradiction to what message the White House and H.H.S. were trying to put forward that they became scrutinized,” Ms. Campbell said.Dr. Tom Frieden, the C.D.C. director under President Barack Obama, said it was typical and “legitimate” to have interagency process for review.“What’s not legitimate is to overrule science,” he said.Often, Mr. McGowan and Ms. Campbell mediated between Dr. Redfield and agency scientists when the White House’s requests and dictates would arrive: edits from Mr. Vought and Kellyanne Conway, the former White House adviser, on choirs and communion in faith communities, or suggestions from Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and aide, on schools.“Every time that the science clashed with the messaging, messaging won,” Mr. McGowan said.Episodes of meddling sometimes turned absurd, they said. In the spring, the C.D.C. published an app that allowed Americans to screen themselves for symptoms of Covid-19. But the Trump administration decided to develop a similar tool with Apple. White House officials then demanded that the C.D.C. wipe its app off its website, Mr. McGowan said.Ms. Campbell said that at the pandemic’s outset, she was confident the agency had the best scientists in the world at its disposal, “just like we had in the past.”“What was so different, though, was the political involvement, not only from H.H.S. but then the White House, ultimately, that in so many ways hampered what our scientists were able to do,” she said.Top C.D.C. officials devised workarounds. Instead of posting new guidance for schools and election officials in the spring, they published “updates” to previous guidance that skipped formal review from Washington. That prompted officials in Washington to insist on reviewing updates.Brian Morgenstern, a White House spokesman, said that “all proposed guidelines and regulations with potentially sweeping effects on our economy, society and constitutional freedoms receive appropriate consultation from all stakeholders, including task force doctors, other experts and administration leaders.”A C.D.C. spokesman declined to comment.Mr. McGowan and Ms. Campbell both attended the University of Georgia and saw their C.D.C. positions as homecomings. Mr. McGowan said the two institutions he revered most during his Georgia childhood were the C.D.C. and Coca-Cola.He arrived with a résumé that made the agency’s senior ranks suspicious, he said. Like Ms. Campbell, he worked for former Representative Tom Price, first in his House office, then when he was health secretary under Mr. Trump. When he arrived at the C.D.C., Mr. McGowan told his new colleagues that he was there not to spy on or undermine them, but to support them.Mr. McGowan and Ms. Campbell, who have since opened a health policy consulting firm, said they saw themselves as keepers of the agency’s senior scientists, whose morale had been sapped. Dr. Redfield, whose leadership has been criticized roundly by public health experts and privately by his own scientists, was rarely in Atlanta, consumed by Washington responsibilities.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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Joe Biden has won so much that he is, apparently, tired of winning.That was the crux of his speech Monday night, after the electoral college vote that made official (or rather, yet again made official) his victory over Donald Trump. After a blizzard of false claims of fraud and frivolous lawsuits, the race is over. The attempt to overturn the people’s will failed.In particular, the president-elect singled out courageous election officials – both Democrats and Republicans – who refused to be cowed by Trump’s attacks on the election. “We owe these public servants a debt of gratitude,” he said, “and our democracy survived because of them.” He didn’t name names, but one can reasonably assume he was talking about conservatives such as Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who publicly debunked pro-Trump conspiracy theories, or its voting system implementation manager, Gabriel Sterling, who warned that the president’s actions were stoking violence and has been since barraged with death threats.As a rhetorical matter, the president-elect was right to praise the courage of Republicans who stood up to Trump’s attempt to overturn the election. He was also right to declare victory for democracy. It’s his job to put the country’s best foot forward.But when it comes to the republic’s longer-term survival, the outcome remains far from certain. Because even the Republican officials who most bravely and patriotically stood up to Trump still don’t get it. The greatest threat to the American experiment isn’t the would-be autocrat on his way out the door. It’s the political party he continues to both lead and personify.The problem begins with the Republican establishment’s relationship to reality itself. Since at least the 1980s, mainstream conservatives have embraced theories that are not well-supported by evidence. (It’s hard to make a compelling argument, for example, that tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves.) But in recent years, as Republicans went from being the party of Reagan to the party of Mitch McConnell, the Republican party has gone from spinning facts to rejecting them entirely.Today, to be an aspiring Republican politician in good standing, one must espouse a set of core beliefs that are either entirely baseless or provably untrue: the climate crisis isn’t real; gun safety laws don’t reduce gun violence; masks don’t reduce the spread of Covid-19. To many observers, embracing a conspiracy theory about corrupted voting machines or late-night “ballot dumps” would represent a break with reality. But for much of the Republican elite, that’s not a problem. They broke with reality long ago.The Republican establishment is also increasingly willing to disenfranchise eligible voters if it helps them win. Between 2008 and 2016, America lost 10% of its polling places, with cuts falling hardest on minority communities. Ever-broader voter purges have kicked millions of eligible, registered voters off red-state voting rolls. In Florida, the Republican state legislature rammed through a new law designed to disenfranchise former felons from voting – despite a 2018 ballot measure in which an overwhelming majority of Floridians voted to restore ex-felons’ rights.These examples barely scrape the surface of the war on voting that Republican politicians, not just Trump, have waged in recent years. The president’s wild attempt to steal an election is a first in American history. But it didn’t come from nowhere. Trump simply absorbed his party establishment’s prevailing view – that it is acceptable to win elections through whatever means possible, including by throwing out large numbers of votes on technicalities, hoping conservative judges put ideology over country, or stoking fears about nonexistent fraud – and took that approach to its logical conclusion.Perhaps that’s why so many Republican elected officials endorsed Trump’s baseless attacks on our democratic process well before the first 2020 ballot was cast. Explicit calls to replace democracy with a different form of government remain relatively rare. But the idea that power should be clung to using any means possible – and that the guardrails of our republic should be ignored or dismantled – is entirely within the Republican mainstream. That’s why Republicans in the Senate refused to call witnesses during Trump’s impeachment trial.It’s commendable that a handful of Republicans stood up to a president and met the low bar he presented. But it’s not enoughThe status quo – a Republican party that attacks democracy without rejecting it entirely – cannot hold. Over the long term, we’ll either have two parties that believe in the consent of the governed, or we’ll have a new and more autocratic form of government. We can’t have both. Yet many of the laudably brave Republicans who stood up to Trump don’t yet recognize that he is a symptom, not a cause. Brad Raffensperger says he supports Georgia’s Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in the state’s 5 January runoff, even though both of them called for him to be fired for defending the election results. Gabriel Sterling, the Georgia official who warned election misinformation could lead to violence, agrees. “Senator Perdue and Senator Loeffler, I feel bad for them,” he said. “I have one of their signs in my yard.”It’s commendable that a handful of Republicans stood up to a president and met the low bar he presented. But it’s not enough. Those who have admirably protected the American experiment from Trump must help America save it from the McConnell-era Republican party. That doesn’t mean Republicans need to change their minds about taxes, regulations, guns, or a host of other a host of other issues that divide the parties. But they do have to agree that democracy is the best way to settle our disagreements – and that those who don’t believe in democracy doesn’t deserve our votes, no matter how much we may support their other positions.Some politicians, such as the retiring congressman Paul Mitchell, have recognized that this is a time for choosing, and publicly left the Republican party over its assault on our nation’s most fundamental ideals. But too many genuinely patriotic Americans believe that they can have it both ways. They still view a politician’s support for authoritarianism as a mere character trait, rather than as the dealbreaker it must be for the country to survive.During his dangerous post-campaign campaign, Trump frequently used a two-part phrase to signal what he thought the country most needed. “WISDOM & COURAGE,” he declared, via tweet. Ironically, he was right. American democracy only made it through this tumultuous year thanks to profiles in courage. But over the haul, courage won’t be enough. We’ll need more profiles in wisdom, too. More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFrom Voter Fraud to Vaccine Lies: Misinformation Peddlers Shift GearsElection-related falsehoods have subsided, but misleading claims about the coronavirus vaccines are surging — often spread by the same people.Sidney Powell, who was a member of President Trump’s legal team, on Capitol Hill last month. She has started posting inaccurate claims about the coronavirus vaccines online.Credit…Jonathan Ernst/ReutersDavey Alba and Dec. 16, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETSidney Powell, a lawyer who was part of President Trump’s legal team, spread a conspiracy theory last month about election fraud. For days, she claimed that she would “release the Kraken” by showing voluminous evidence that Mr. Trump had won the election by a landslide.But after her assertions were widely derided and failed to gain legal traction, Ms. Powell started talking about a new topic. On Dec. 4, she posted a link on Twitter with misinformation that said that the population would be split into the vaccinated and the unvaccinated and that “big government” could surveil those who were unvaccinated.“NO WAY #America,” Ms. Powell wrote in the tweet, which collected 22,600 shares and 51,000 likes. “This is more authoritarian communist control imported straight from #China.” She then tagged Mr. Trump and the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn — both of whom she had represented — and other prominent right-wing figures to highlight the post.Ms. Powell’s changing tune was part of a broader shift in online misinformation. As Mr. Trump’s challenges to the election’s results have been knocked down and the Electoral College has affirmed President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s win, voter fraud misinformation has subsided. Instead, peddlers of online falsehoods are ramping up lies about the Covid-19 vaccines, which were administered to Americans for the first time this week.Apart from Ms. Powell, others who have spread political misinformation such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia, as well as far-right websites like ZeroHedge, have begun pushing false vaccine narratives, researchers said. Their efforts have been amplified by a robust network of anti-vaccination activists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on platforms including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.Among their misleading notions is the idea that the vaccines are delivered with a microchip or bar code to keep track of people, as well as a lie that the vaccines will hurt everyone’s health (the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna have been proved to be more than 94 percent effective in trials, with minimal side effects). Falsehoods about Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist who supports vaccines, have also increased, with rumors that he is responsible for the coronavirus and that he stands to profit from a vaccine, according to data from media insights company Zignal Labs.The shift shows how political misinformation purveyors are hopping from topic to topic to maintain attention and influence, said Melissa Ryan, chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation.It is “an easy pivot,” she said. “Disinformation about vaccines and the pandemic have long been staples of the pro-Trump disinformation playbook.”The change has been particularly evident over the last six weeks. Election misinformation peaked on Nov. 4 at 375,000 mentions across cable television, social media, print and online news outlets, according to an analysis by Zignal. By Dec. 3, that had fallen to 60,000 mentions. But coronavirus misinformation steadily increased over that period, rising to 46,100 mentions on Dec. 3, from 17,900 mentions on Nov. 8.NewsGuard, a start-up that fights false stories, said that of the 145 websites in its Election Misinformation Tracking Center, a database of sites that publish false election information, 60 percent of them have also published misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. That includes right-wing outlets such as Breitbart, Newsmax and One America News Network, which distributed inaccurate articles about the election and are now also running misleading articles about the vaccines.John Gregory, the deputy health editor for NewsGuard, said the shift was not to be taken lightly because false information about vaccines leads to real-world harm. In Britain in the early 2000s, he said, a baseless link between the measles vaccine and autism spooked people into not taking that vaccine. That led to deaths and serious permanent injuries, he said.“Misinformation creates fear and uncertainty around the vaccine and can reduce the number of people willing to take it,” said Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington evolutionary biologist who has been tracking the pandemic.Dr. Shira Doron, an epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, said the consequences of people not taking the Covid-19 vaccines because of misinformation would be catastrophic. The vaccines are “the key piece to ending the pandemic,” she said. “We are not getting there any other way.”Ms. Powell did not respond to a request for comment.To deal with vaccine misinformation, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media sites have expanded their policies to fact-check and demote such posts. Facebook and YouTube said they would remove false claims about the vaccines, while Twitter said it pointed people to credible public health sources.Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 16, 2020, 9:57 a.m. ETThe latest: Domino’s will pay its hourly workers a bonus.LVMH takes a stake in WhistlePig, an American rye whiskey brand.U.S. retail sales decline more than expected in November.The flow of vaccine falsehoods began rising in recent weeks as it became clear that the coronavirus vaccines would soon be approved and available. Misinformation spreaders glommed onto interviews by health experts and began twisting them.On Dec. 3, for example, Dr. Kelly Moore, the associate director for immunization education at the nonprofit Immunization Action Coalition, said in an interview with CNN that when people receive the vaccine, “everyone will be issued a written card” that would “tell them what vaccine they had and when their next dose is due.”Dr. Moore was referring to a standard appointment reminder card that could also be used as a backup vaccine record. But skeptics quickly started saying online that the card was evidence that the U.S. government intended to surveil the population and limit the activities of people who were unvaccinated.That unfounded idea was further fueled by people like Ms. Powell and her Dec. 4 tweet. Her post pushed the narrative to 47,025 misinformation mentions that week, according to Zignal, making it the No. 1 vaccine misinformation story at the time.To give more credence to the idea, Ms. Powell also appended a link to an article from ZeroHedge, which claimed that immunity cards would “enable CDC to track Covid-19 vaxx status in database.” On Facebook, that article was liked and commented on 24,600 times, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics tool. It also reached up to one million people.ZeroHedge did not respond to a request for comment.In an interview, Dr. Moore said she could not believe how her words had been distorted to seem as if she was supporting surveillance and restrictions on unvaccinated members of the public. “In fact, I was simply describing an ordinary appointment reminder card,” she said. “This is an old-school practice that goes on around the world.”Angela Stanton-King, a Republican candidate for Congress in Georgia, in Atlanta last month.Credit…Megan Varner/Getty ImagesOther supporters of Mr. Trump who said the election had been stolen from him also began posting vaccine falsehoods. One was Angela Stanton-King, a former Republican candidate for Congress from Georgia and a former reality TV star. On Dec. 5, she tweeted that her father would be forced to take the coronavirus vaccine, even though in reality the government has not made it mandatory.“My 78 yr old father tested positive for COVID before Thanksgiving he was told to go home and quarantine with no prescribed medication,” Ms. Stanton-King wrote in her tweet, which was liked and shared 13,200 times. “He had zero symptoms and is perfectly fine. Help me understand why we need a mandatory vaccine for a virus that heals itself…”Ms. Stanton-King declined to comment.Anti-vaccination activists have also jumped in. When two people in Britain had an adverse reaction to Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine this month, Mr. Kennedy, a son of former Senator Robert F. Kennedy who campaigns against vaccines as chairman of the anti-vaccination group Children’s Health Defense, pushed the unproven notion on Facebook that ingredients in the vaccine led to the reactions. He stripped out context that such reactions are usually very rare and it is not yet known whether the vaccines caused them.His Facebook post was shared 556 times and reached nearly a million people, according to CrowdTangle data. In an email, Mr. Kennedy said the Food and Drug Administration should “require pre-screening” of vaccine recipients and “monitor allergic and autoimmune reactions,” without acknowledging that regulators have already said they would do so.Ms. Ryan, the disinformation researcher, said that as long as there were loopholes for misinformation to stay up on social media platforms, purveyors would continue pushing falsehoods about the news topic of the day. It could be QAnon today, the election tomorrow, Covid-19 vaccines after that, she said.“They need to stay relevant,” she said. “Without Trump, they’re going to need new hobbies.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More