An 11-second video extract has been circulating for several days to make Rochelle Walensky say the exact opposite of what she really said.
Rochelle Walensky, CDC director, interviewed January 7, 2022 on ABC (YouTube screenshot).
In the age of social media and the Covid-19 pandemic, effective disinformation requires few tools and investments.
The recipe is simple: take a television interview with a senior public health official; select the passage that interests you; cut the previous question during the editing so as to disguise his words; add an explosive comment as if you had just unearthed the scoop of the year; Post the sequence on Twitter or Telegram then encourage your “reformer” friends to massively distribute the infox. In a matter of hours, your post will be viewed hundreds of thousands of times, if not millions, and you’ve got it right.
This is exactly what happened after the passage on January 7 on the ABC channel from Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US federal agency for the protection of public health.
Rochelle Walensky, who faces many reviews health specialists following the publication by his agency of the new isolation rules for people infected with the virus, took advantage of this interview of a few minutes in the program ” Good Morning America To clarify and justify the recommendations of his agency.
But this is not the subject that will cause a flood of false information on social networks. To end the exchange on an optimistic note, the presenter Cecilia Vega discusses the effectiveness of vaccination against severe forms and death, citing the latest CDC study on this subject. And it is Rochelle Walensky’s response that will be the subject of manipulation and hijacking on social networks by the ultra-conservative American right with an anti-ax tendency.
Here are the words broadcast by ABC:
CECILIA VEGA – I want to ask you about this new study showing how well vaccines work in preventing severe forms. Given the results, is it time to start rethinking how we are living with this virus, that it is potentially here to stay?
ROCHELLE WALENSKY – […] Most of the deaths, over 75%, occurred in people with four or more co-morbidities. These are people who were not in good health. And yes, that’s really encouraging news in the context of Omicron. […]
With a banner reading “New study says severe forms are rare in people vaccinated,” it’s easy to understand what the CDC director said. Basically, vaccines protect very effectively since a very large majority of deaths to be deplored as a result of Covid-19 among vaccinated people concern people whose health is already very degraded.
However, the complosphere will indulge in a shameless manipulation by keeping only the first two sentences of Rochelle Walensky’s answer and by removing the question from the presenter.
Here is the sequence after truncation, posted by the elected Republican David Shafer:
The @CDCgov director says that over 75% of Covid deaths were among people with “at least four comorbidities” and “who were unwell to begin with”
pic.twitter.com/gW1fBMv9El— David Shafer (@DavidShafer) January 11, 2022
As of January 12, 2022, this 11-second clip has already accumulated more than 4 million views.
American anti-tax influencers and some prominent figures in the Republican Party like Donald Trump Junior Where Ted Cruz, joined by the star presenter of Fox News Tucker Carlson, have duped millions of people with a truncated video of a few seconds which misleadingly suggests that the Covid-19 has not killed, since its appearance, that people in very poor health, which suggests that vaccination would be unnecessary.
The extract was notably relayed in French by the Trump Fact News account with the following comment: « The director of CDC cwe admit that more than 75% of deaths linked to Covid concerned people with “at least four comorbidities” and “who were not doing well at the start” “.
Other accounts disseminated the infox such as the conspiratorial blog Anguille sous roche [archive], Paul-Eric Blanrue [archive] or the antivax Twitter account with more than 20,000 subscribers, MAMMIE Bocock
Source : Twitter, 10/01/2022.
This disinformation was probably also involuntarily facilitated by ABC which, at first, broadcast an excerpt from the interview Rochelle Walensky cut off the first part of her answer. Here is the full story of Rochelle Walensky, posted by the channel a few hours later:
ROCHELLE WALENSKY : You know, this is a really important study. If I can just summarize: this study of 1.2 million people vaccinated between December 2020 and October 2021 demonstrated that a severe form of the disease occurred in about 0.015% of people and that death affected 0.003% of these. people. Most of the deaths, over 75%, occurred in people with four or more co-morbidities. These are people who were not in good health. And yes, that’s really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.
The full interview is available on the YouTube channel of “Good Morning America”.
The percentages given in the interview correspond well to the figures of the study published by the CDC, available here. Out of 1,228,664 people vaccinated between December 2020 and October 2021, serious forms associated with Covid-19 (0.015%) or deaths (0.0033%) were rare. Risk factors for severe form included age (over 65), immunosuppression, and six other underlying conditions. 78% of those vaccinated who died had at least four.