March 10, 2022

Um, A Couple Of Facts For Our Good Friends In Trumpville

First, there's this:

That's Donald Trump, the twice-impeached treason instigator, talking with Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee.

And here's a transcript:

RMcD: And you saved hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives with that.

DJT: Well you know we had 1n 1917 a hundred million people died. I think we would've had the same thing so.

We did something that was incredible. We did it in less than nine months and it was supposed to take anywhere from five to twelve years.

He's talking about the coronavirus vaccine.

Let me type that out more clearly. Donald J. Trump, while speaking to the chair of the RNC, claimed that, were it not for the vaccine program he began, a hundred million people would be dead from Covid-19. 

Then there's this from Fox News (Fox News!!):

That's the Fox News (Fox News!!) National Security correspondent Jennifer Griffin debunking the latest right-wing/Russian disinformation story floating around: That the reason Putin invaded Ukraine was because the US DoD had biolabs there.

Fact-check, uh, fact checked this story a few days ago:

The U.S. Department of Defense’s Biological Threat Reduction Program has provided technical support to improve and protect Ukraine’s public health laboratories. Social media posts, however, falsely claim the program created “bioweapons labs” that are being targeted by Russian forces as part of the invasion of Ukraine.

Specifically:

The posts misrepresent a 2005 pact under which the U.S. Department of Defense and Ukraine’s Ministry of Health agreed to work together to ensure that labs studying disease in Ukraine could not be used to develop biological weapons and to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, the Kyiv Post reported in May 2020.

The U.S. Biological Threat Reduction Program’s “priorities in Ukraine are to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern and to continue to ensure Ukraine can detect and report outbreaks caused by dangerous pathogens before they pose security or stability threats,” according to the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine.

The arrangement grew out of the 1994 agreements under which Ukraine gave up the nuclear weapons that remained in its possession after the breakup of the Soviet Union and which, at the time, made Ukraine the third largest nuclear power in the world.

So, in summary:

  • Donald Trump said that without the coronavirus vaccines, one hundred million people would have died
  • Fox News Nat'l Sec correspondent says that those Ukrainian biolabs are "Soviet-era bio labs" that the DoD were helping the Ukrainians to convert into public health safety labs.

If you have a problem with those facts, you have a problem with Donald J Trump and Fox News.

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