Who is fact checking The New York Times fact check of the Rogan interview of Robert Malone?

Where are the fact checkers when you need them? We'd like to debate them. Nowhere to be found. We'd like them to fact check the NY Times fact check of the Malone Rogan interview. No dice.

On February 8, The New York Times fact checked the Malone interview on Joe Rogan.

I don’t think it went so well for the Times.

I wondered…who is fact checking the Times? I guess it’s up to me.

I don’t have time to go through the whole thing which would probably bore you, so I’m just going to address items in the first 3 points they made and hope that you cab see the pattern.

Example #1: Malone said Uttar Pradesh was flatlined at the time of the interview

Malone said:

“Whatever was in those packages was rumored to include ivermectin. But there was a specific visit of Biden to Modi and a decision was made in the Indian government not to disclose the contents of those packages that were being deployed in Uttar Pradesh, which they’re still there, and Uttar Pradesh is flatlined right now.”

NY Times said:

“Dr. Malone was also wrong that cases in Uttar Pradesh “flatlined” as the world coped with the Omicron variant. Though the case count in the state remained low during the summer and fall, it began to trend upward by late December, when Dr. Malone spoke with Mr. Rogan.”

Here’s the data from Johns Hopkins as presented by Google:

Look at the line before Dec 31. Looks flat to me. Does it look flat to you?

See, neither of us can get a job at the NY Times doing fact checks.

The segment with Rogan was taped before it was released in late December.

Malone was absolutely right. Cases didn’t go up until January.

Example #2: Malone said they didn’t aspirate. The Times confirmed they didn’t.

The conversation was:

Mr. Rogan: “But I saw the shot where Joe Biden got it on TV and they didn’t aspirate them. They just ——”

Dr. Malone: “I don’t know what to say ——”

Mr. Rogan: “I’ll tell you what to say — that’s not the way to do it.”

Dr. Malone: “Yeah, and was that really a vaccine? Right, then we go down that whole rabbit ——”

Mr. Rogan: “That’s my favorite rabbit hole because of the fake set, remember.”

NY Times said:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not recommend aspirating before administering any vaccines, as it could cause additional pain.

Both statements are true. But this doesn’t prove that Malone made an error. Malone basically agreed that they didn’t aspirate and the Times said they didn’t either. Again, the Times failed to prove Malone made a mistake. Malone is allowed to speculate about whether the COVID vaccine is really a vaccine since he’s using the more traditional definition of vaccine before the CDC changed it. It’s an interesting debate question but the Times never proved he was wrong.

Example #3

What was said:

Mr. Rogan: “So, if they had just done what Sweden had done and some other countries where they didn’t institute lockdowns and they sort of let people just live their lives and make their own choices, they were saying that millions of people would have died?”

Dr. Malone: “So it would be, so it seems.”

Mr. Rogan: “But time has shown that Sweden actually had a more effective take on the virus.”

NY Times said:

Compared with those of other countries in Europe, Sweden’s death rate and case count are indeed in the middle of the pack. Among its Scandinavian neighbors, however, Sweden has the highest death rate.

But Rogan basically said that Sweden didn’t do stuff that didn’t make a difference. Indeed, the Times admitted Sweden was in the middle of the pack. In short, Sweden did all these things that according to experts should have made things worse and it didn’t. So I think it’s fair to say that Sweden didn’t do stupid stuff that made no difference. The numbers bear this out.

As for the Times claim that the death rate is higher in Sweden, that’s right, but there’s a reason for that which was explained in this Financial Times interview:

And while Sweden has fared better than many European countries during the pandemic, it has done worse than all of its Nordic neighbours. Tegnell claimed that Sweden stood out more from the likes of Norway and Finland because it had more migrants from outside the EU and more poorer people.

“Swedish society is very different from the society in Norway and Finland, which we tend to disregard because we share a long history together and have similar languages. Covid doesn’t care about history or language, it cares about socio-economic status or migrant backgrounds or crowded housing. That’s where Sweden stands out in a Nordic context, but not so much in a EU context,” he said.

In other words, the Times itself was misleading people by making that remark about Sweden’s death rates without disclosing the reasons for the differences.

My conclusion is that it does appear Sweden was smart and avoided a lot of needless regulations.

Summary

In my opinion, The New York Times didn’t do an unbiased fact check of the Malone interview. They clearly had an agenda to find as many little things as they could to try to discredit Malone.

I didn’t go through their entire list (I’ll leave that for others), but just looked at their top 3 whoppers and I was very unimpressed with their attempts to discredit the interview.

What do you think?