Axios tried to smear Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas this week by falsely claiming that he said Covid-19 shots were manufactured using “aborted children,” a factually true statement.
“Clarence Thomas says COVID vaccines are created with cells from ‘aborted children,’” one Axios headline blared.
The basis for Axios’s blatant lie about the justice stemmed from one of Thomas’s dissents after the highest court in the land refused to take up a case challenging New York’s Covid shot mandate.
One look at the dissent published on Thursday shows that Thomas was simply quoting the petitioner’s argument, which stated some healthcare workers have a religious objection to Covid shots “due to their origin from ‘abortion-derived fetal cell lines in testing, development, or production.’”
“Petitioners are 16 healthcare workers who served New York communities throughout the COVID–19 pandemic. They object on religious grounds to all available COVID–19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children,” Thomas wrote.
Despite the fact that Thomas was obviously not taking a direct stance on the ethics of vaccines, corrupt corporate media outlets such as Politico and NBC News twisted the justice’s repetition of the plaintiff’s claims into the lie that Thomas was somehow spreading a “debunked claim” about Covid shots from the bench.
These articles were quickly amplified by corporate media henchmen such as The Washington Post’s resident “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler and even picked up by local NBC channels.
Thomas did not take a stance on Covid-19 shots, plain and simple. But even if he did claim that the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines were “developed using cell lines derived from aborted children,” he wouldn’t be wrong.
As the petitioners noted in their case, all three of the Covid shot manufacturers used cells from aborted babies in their testing and sometimes manufacturing processes. That’s why so many religious groups including Catholics strongly opposed Covid shot mandates. Even the NBC write-up “refuting” Thomas’ alleged “debunked” claim admitted, “Pfizer and Moderna used fetal cell lines early in their Covid vaccine development to test the efficacy of their formulas … The fetal tissue used in these processes came from elective abortions.”
So if Thomas was only quoting the plaintiffs and didn’t lie in his quote, why did the corporate media target him without any regard for the facts? Because they hate Thomas and anyone who dares question their narrative about anything.
It was not an accident that at least three different outlets ran stories centered on a lie that was designed to discredit Thomas, as they’ve done for decades, since before he was confirmed as a justice. It was a coordinated effort to tarnish the reputation of the justice most hated by leftists and their allies in the press.
Sweeping efforts like these aren’t just bad journalism, they are straight propaganda invented to malign conservatives, punish them for failing to appease the leftist agenda, and erase them from history.
Updated 5:20 p.m.:
Politico revised its story late Friday afternoon, tweaking it to say Justice Thomas “cited claims” about cell lines from aborted babies being used in Covid vaccine production. The original article had “misattributed the claim that Covid vaccines were ‘developed using cell lines derived from aborted children’ to Thomas,” a correction note said. The revised article did not explain why it was newsworthy that a justice had quoted a petitioner’s argument in his dissent to the court’s denial of certiorari.
Source: The Federalist
