Christian ethicists ‘bless’ two leading COVID vaccines (but not the third)

 After eight months of pandemic, it now seems that not one, but three, vaccines are nearing approval. The question is how many Americans will be willing to take the vaccines. There seems to be a growing anti-vaccination movement, but even people who don’t oppose vaccines in general might be skeptical about the COVID vaccines for political reasons. At least one objection, the question of whether the vaccines used stem cells from aborted babies, is now being addressed by Christian ethicists.

Anti-vaccination activists have a variety of rationales for their position, but one that I have heard frequently from Christians is that some vaccines were made using fetal tissue from surgically aborted babies. This presents an ethical dilemma for those of us who oppose abortion on moral grounds.

The good news is that this objection does not apply to all vaccines. Further good news is that two of the three leading vaccines are ethically sourced and do not use fetal tissue from elective abortions.

Doctors at the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute have investigated the most advanced vaccine research efforts and categorized them as ethical or unethical.

“While some may see no ethical problem, for many a straight line can be drawn from the ending of a human life in an abortion to a vaccine or drug created using cells derived from the harvesting of the fetal tissue,” the author’s of the institute’s assessment state. “Even if the cells have been propagated for years in the laboratory far removed from the abortion, that connection line remains.  Thus, use of such cells for vaccine production raises problems of conscience for anyone who might be offered that vaccine and is aware of its lineage.  Moreover, the possibility of conscientious objection by those to whom a vaccine is offered creates ethical demands on the policymakers, healthcare officials, scientists, vaccine creators and funders, whether or not they themselves have an ethical concern, because of the question of access to the vaccine by the entire citizenry in good conscience.”

Of the three most promising vaccines, Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca, two are rated by the institute as “ethically uncontroversial.” These are the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, both of which are more than 90 percent effective. However, the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is being developed in partnership with the University of Oxford, is considered unethical because it uses the HEK293 line of embryonic kidney cells, which may have come from an elective abortion in the 1960s. The identity of the unborn baby and the circumstances of its abortion are not publicly known.

While some other vaccines may also use fetal stem cells, points out that not all use of fetal tissue is ethically questionable. The Bioethics Observatory points out that fetal tissue that was obtained from spontaneous miscarriages or medically necessary abortions can be ethically used provided there is “consent from the parents and the fetus should be treated with the utmost respect.”

In a recent memo reported in America Magazine, Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades and Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann the US Council of Catholic Bishops point out, “Neither the Pfizer nor the Moderna vaccine involved the use of cell lines that originated in fetal tissue taken from the body of an aborted baby at any level of design, development, or production.”

The memo explains that the Catholic Church’s view is that Christians should not use stem cells obtained from aborted babies, but the Church understands that there are different levels of responsibility at different points in the chain that brings vaccines to market. Vaccine creators have different culpability from patients who will receive the vaccine.

The bishops take the practical view that “it is morally permissible to accept vaccination when there are no alternatives and there is a serious risk to health.”

In other words, unethically-produced medicines can still be used to save lives in emergencies. This loophole is not needed for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, however.

“In terms of the moral principles of being concerned about the use of any pharmaceuticals that were developed from aborted fetuses, that is certainly an issue that we all want to be cognizant of and try to avoid their use,” said Brian Kane, the senior director of ethics for the Catholic Health Association of the United States. “With that in mind, the Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines that are coming out are not even tainted with that moral problem.”

Others, such as Megan Best of the Gospel Coalition, argue that even using fetal tissue from elective abortions is not unethical provided that the abortion was not carried out for the specific purpose of harvesting the cells.

If “the abortion was carried out for other reasons, and the tissue was acquired after the child’s death for the purpose medical research,” she writes, “The use of the vaccine now will not promote further abortions for this particular purpose. It can therefore be argued that we are not morally complicit with the original abortion.”

“While never condoning evil acts so that good may result, the Bible teaches of a loving God who seeks to make good out of evil,” Best continues. “Though linked, participation in the good does not endorse the evil.”

Regardless of which view you take on fetal tissue research, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines present no ethical problems. However, even knowing that Coronavirus vaccines were not based on aborted fetal tissue, many people still will not want to take one. That brings up another ethical quandary, the question of whether refusing to take a vaccine that will enable us to end a pandemic that has already resulted in more than a million deaths around the world reflects the love that God wants us to show for our fellow man.

Originally published on The First TV

The best news of the week arrived on Monday morning

 It’s before noon on Monday and we have probably already hit a high point for the week. I’m speaking of the announcement by Pfizer that the company’s Coronavirus vaccine has been found to be 90 percent effective in an interim analysis. The stock market cheered the news with a rally of more than 1,000 points.

The world still has a long way to go to end the pandemic but the news of Pfizer’s accomplishment is encouraging. The interim analysis of 94 Coronavirus cases in the study found that fewer than 10 percent of patients who had been given the vaccine were infected by COVID-19 while more than 90 percent of the cases were in people who received a placebo.

This does not mean that the pandemic is over but it does represent a huge step forward. The study, which includes more than 43,000 people, has so far not revealed any serious safety concerns, but the trial is not yet over and the vaccine has not been approved. The company expects to submit the vaccine for emergency FDA approval after a required safety milestone is reached in the third week of November.

Pfizer hopes to manufacture and distribute 50 million vaccine doses in 2020 and up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021. The company is not part of the Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed, but did partner with the federal government in July for the distribution of 100 million doses of a future vaccine.

The Pfizer vaccine is taken in two doses and uses a completely new technology called messenger RNA, or mRNA, to produce an immune response in people who are vaccinated. It is likely that the vaccine will require boosters every few years once it is administered.

The downside is that we are months away from approval and widespread distribution of the vaccine. We don’t need to let down our guard because COVID-19 kills in about three weeks and there is still no cure. Today’s announcement is not the end of the pandemic, but it is the beginning of the end.

Regardless of which side of the political debate you are one, we should celebrate being one step closer to an end to the pandemic with herd immunity reached through a vaccine rather than through a cataclysmic death rate. The end of the emergency and a return to normalcy is in sight.

Originally published on The First TV

Donald Trump Defends The COVID Vaccine… Finally

 President Trump has come out swinging after Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris expressed doubt about a potential Coronavirus vaccine last week. The president charged that Harris and Democratic nominee Joe Biden were engaging in “reckless anti-vaccine rhetoric” and “endangering lives.” To some extent, he has a point but that’s not the full story.

The kerfuffle began last week when CNN released a clip of Harris saying, “I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he’s talking about. I will not take his word for it.”

Or did it?

Maybe it started last month when President Trump announced a push to approve a vaccine before Election Day or earlier last week when the CDC advised states to be ready to begin distribution of a vaccine by November 1.

Or did it?

Maybe the vaccine brouhaha began way back in the spring when right-wing conspiracy theorists started claiming that Bill Gates was planning to use a COVID vaccine as a Trojan horse for either mind control or population control (or both) depending on which version of the conspiracy they embraced. Like the underwear gnomes from South Park, the plan by Gates and/or the Illuminati/New World Order/whatever was generally explained like this:

Step One – Vaccine and/or mask mandates
Step Two – ???????????
Step Three – Fascism… Or communism… Or both.

I do applaud the president for defending the upcoming vaccine. His statement that a vaccine would be “very safe and very effective” was much needed. If there was any problem with this part of the statement, it was that it was five months in coming.

“The people will be happy, the people of the world will be happy,” the president added.

If you doubt the anti-vaccine hysteria surrounding a Coronavirus vaccine, you need only look to an August Gallup poll which found that 35 percent of Americans would not get an FDA-approved COVID vaccine, even if it was offered at no cost. The kicker is that Republicans were the only group in which a majority opposed the vaccine (53-47 percent).

But, while Kamala Harris’s words did not help the matter, it is the president’s own rush to approve a vaccine that has led at least some of the non-conspiracy crowd to doubt the safety and the efficacy of vaccine that bypasses the normal trials and approvals process.

Problems that come from bypassing safeguards, not mind-control chips, are the real danger of a vaccine. In 1976, the federal government rushed a swine flu vaccine in response to an expected epidemic. Smithsonian magazine notes politics became prevalent and science took a backseat. In the end, the vaccine was linked to increased risk for a rare neurological disorder, and the fiasco contributed to skepticism about vaccines that lasts to this day.

Even more recently, last spring Coronavirus test kits were in short supply because of a problem in the manufacturing process. The Washington Post reported that the problems were due to contamination at a CDC lab that “violated sound manufacturing practices.”

Cutting corners can cost lives. This is true both in the direct sense that an untested vaccine could be dangerous and indirectly due to time lost in fixing problems that would have been revealed earlier by following established procedures. As my dad has been known to say, “You can make time to do it right or make time to do it over.”

To his credit, Joe Biden stepped up to quell vaccine fears. Fox News quoted Biden as saying, “If I could get a vaccine tomorrow I’d do it. If it cost me the election I’d do it. We need a vaccine and we need it now.”

“I would want to see what the scientists said,” Biden qualified.

But Biden had some sharp words for Trump as well, charging that the president was “playing with politics. He said so many things that aren’t true.”

“If we do have a really good vaccine people are going to be reluctant to take it,” Biden added, which is a true statement supported by the poll cited earlier.

So what to do? The obvious answer is to avoid politicizing the vaccine. President Trump should stand back and let the scientists and medical experts handle the matter. In the past, the FDA has said that it will not “cut corners” in vaccine trials, and Moncef Slaoui, the scientist heading the “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine effort said last week that a vaccine by November was “possible but very unlikely,” per the Washington Post.

It is when the president’s statements conflict with those of the scientists that it sets off alarm bells in many people’s heads. In medical matters, we should be listening to the medical experts and not the guy who suggested injecting disinfectants. If the president wants to undercut a vaccine panic among Democrats and non-Republicans, it is as simple as saying that no vaccine will be approved or deployed before the doctors say that it is ready. Mr. Trump should paraphrase the old wine commercial with the consistent message, “I will serve no vaccine before its time.”

In the meantime, if the president wants to help the fight against the pandemic, he can start talking more to his base about the need for masks, social distancing, and a vaccine. In the end, it is the president’s own supporters who are more likely to “just say no” to a COVID vaccine than Biden backers. Straight talk about the need for mitigations from a president loved for his “truth-telling” might go a long way with the right-wing conspiracy crowd.

Or it might not. The president took months to call on his supporters to wear a mask (and to wear one publicly himself). In truth, the president’s message has been inconsistent. In July, the president called wearing a mask “patriotic” but no masks were in sight at the August Republican National Convention, even though attendees were not socially distanced.

From my conversations with Trump supporters over the past few months, it doesn’t seem as if the president’s call for masks made much of an impression on his supporters. Republicans seem just as anti-mask after the president made his pitch as they were before with many wearing masks (often incorrectly) only when they are required.

The same may be true of the vaccine. The anti-vaxxer conspiracies may now be so ingrained into so many Republicans that even President Trump cannot reverse it at this point. (It should be noted that the president made anti-vaccine comments back in 2016.)

To test this theory, I asked several friends in a Facebook group whether the president’s defense of the vaccine. Of the people who responded at press time, none said that the president’s statement changed their mind about vaccines.

“I am not a fan of vaccines in the contemporary era,” Russ said. “Proven old-school vaccines we grew up with were time tested, but the modern vaccine feels rushed, pushed (as in media advertising) and generally come off as ‘sales pitchy.'”

“If big pharma had not grown into a ‘mega-plex’ industry I might feel differently,” he added. “If science had not become ‘doctrine’ and ‘dogma’ on most matters, I would feel differently. Industrial growth is bad for overall trust.”

“I’m not a fan of the president, nor will I be getting the vaccine,” Tracy stated.

“I support effective vaccines for illnesses that are necessary to be vaccinated against,” said Janice. “My jury is still out on COVID.”

Janice’s opinion is where a lot of people are. They aren’t necessarily against vaccines in general, but they do want to ensure that a Coronavirus vaccine is safe and effective before they take it. That underscores the need for President Trump and his medical experts to be on the same page with respect to the fact that the vaccine will not be given until it is fully tested and approved.

My plea to both President Trump and the Democrats is this: Don’t make this political. Let the scientists follow established guidelines and do their jobs.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Coronavirus May Mutate Faster Than Previously Thought

A new study shows that the COVID-19 virus mutated into at least 33 different strains. The study by Chinese researchers, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, found 19 mutations that were not previously known.

Newsweek reported that the researchers found “significant variation” in how the different mutations of the virus attack cells, called the cytopathic effect (CPE), and the quantity of the virus in the bodily fluids of an infected person, termed the viral load. Different mutations of the virus lead to different levels of severity in Coronavirus patients.

“The observed mutations in our study, and possibly in the viral isolates collected around the world, can significantly impact the pathogenicity of SARS-CoV-2,” the researchers wrote.

Several weeks ago, Resurgent reported that researchers had found only minimal differences between the few mutations of COVID-19 that were then known. The new information about mutations may mean that it is more difficult to create an effective Coronavirus vaccine.

“Depending on the nature of the mutations, some mutations would indeed weaken the vaccine effect if they are not taken into considerations,” said Chao Jiang of Zhejiang University, the author of the study. “Since vaccines have different strategies that target different things in the viruses, it’s difficult to make a blanket statement. However, there are numerous vaccine developments going on at the same time, so we remain optimistic.”

As explained by Axios, Coronaviruses, which are coded in RNA, mutate faster than DNA viruses. Unlike other RNA viruses, however, Coronaviruses have the ability to proofread as they duplicate to minimize errors in the copying process. As a result, although the number of mutations may be high as the virus infects millions of people around the world, the mutations don’t result in changes that are as large as those in other viruses, such as influenza, which requires a different vaccine every year.

A researcher not involved in the study, Yong Gia of Australia’s Murdoch University, said that the mutations led to very different levels of virulence but did not reflect big changes in the makeup of the virus.

“The possibility of a single or several point mutations making vaccines futile is generally low,” Gia said, but noted, “As the virus continues spreading and infecting a large population of people, the number of mutations would still accumulate to a high level, despite the low mutation rate.”

The study did not explain how the mutations affected the level of virulence. Such details will likely the subject of future research.

The question of mutations is important because it affects the virus’s ability to reinfect people who have recovered as well as the ability of researchers to create a vaccine. Already, there is some evidence of secondary infections in patients in both South Korea and China. At this point, no one knows for sure if Coronairus patients can catch the disease more than once, like the flu, or in one infection confers immunity as with diseases like chickenpox.

At this point, we don’t know how easy it will be to develop a Coronavirus vaccine. There are vaccines for other RNA viruses, such as the flu. There are even vaccines for some Coronaviruses that affect animals. However, more than 30 years of research have not developed an HIV vaccine.

A Houston researcher at Texas Children’s Hospital says that his team came close to developing a vaccine for SARS in 2016 could not get funding for human trials. Dr. Pete Hotez told NBC News that he believes his SARS vaccine could have provided an invaluable head start in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, but, as of early March, the experimental vaccine was still in a freezer in Texas where it had been for the past four years.

“We could have had this ready to go and been testing the vaccine’s efficacy at the start of this new outbreak in China,” Hotez said.

There are several research projects for COVID-19 vaccines that are already underway. A Chinese company says that it has developed a vaccine that protects monkeys from the virus and an Anglo-American effort is starting human trials. The team of US and British researchers designed their vaccine in three hours after receiving the genome sequencing of COVID-19 from the Chinese government. There is no guarantee, however, that either project will be successful.

Even if the drugs are successful, it will likely be more than a year before a vaccine is ready. Scientific American explains that safety standards dictate that vaccines be vigorously tested because they will be injected into large numbers of healthy people, hundreds of millions in the case of a COVID vaccine. Clinical trials might require tens of thousands of participants to ensure that a new vaccine is both effective and safe.

The new revelations underscore just how much we don’t know about COVID-19. The crash course to develop a Coronavirus vaccine may result in the most rapidly developed vaccine in history or it may yet fail completely. With the prospect of a second and possibly more lethal wave of infections in the fall, a successful vaccine can’t come too soon but it seems likely that the world will have to endure at least one more wave of outbreaks. The possibility that surviving COVID-19 might not confer immunity due to mutations makes the discovery of a vaccine all the more important.

Most of us can do little more to help the vaccine effort than to offer our prayers and moral support. We can, however, do our part of slow the spread of the virus. In addition to fewer deaths, fewer infections mean that COVID-19 has fewer chances to mutate. That could both help researchers close in on a vaccine and prevent the creation of an even more lethal version of the virus.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Are You Ready For Some Good News About The Coronavirus Pandemic?

It seems that the last few weeks have brought a relentless drumbeat of bad news as COVID-19 spread through the country, infecting tens of thousands and killing hundreds. The outbreak led to a nationwide stay-at-home recommendation, sparked a panic that led to store shelves bare of food and toilet paper, and led to a stock market rout. For weeks now, there have been very few bright spots, but now there is a definite piece of encouraging news coming from medical researchers: The Coronavirus is not mutating.

The Washington Post reports that scientists studying COVID-19 say that the virus is not making significant changes as it spreads around the world. Per the researchers, the virus has internal proofreading systems that reduce the error rate as it duplicates itself. Fewer errors mean fewer mutations.

The Coronavirus looks pretty much the same everywhere it has appeared, the scientists say. Even though there is more than one strain of the virus, there is almost no difference in the danger and death rate between different versions.

Earlier this month, there were reports that Chinese researchers had discovered a second strain of the COVID-19 virus. While L-type and S-type strains have been identified, New Scientist reported that there were only tiny differences between the two. The second strain may have emerged as the virus adapted to life in its new human hosts.

“In all practical terms, the virus is as it was when it originally emerged,” said Ian Jones, a virologist at the UK’s University of Reading. “There’s no evidence it is getting any worse.”

The news that Coronavirus is not mutating is good for two reasons. First, it means that when a vaccine is developed, it may be good for life. If, like chickenpox and measles, COVID-19 doesn’t change frequently, one vaccination could last indefinitely and be very effective.

On the other hand, if the virus had been found to mutate rapidly, like the flu virus, researchers could have ended up chasing a moving target with the vaccine. The flu virus mutates almost constantly requiring annual updates to the vaccine. Vaccine developers must make educated guesses as to what the dominant strain will be each year. As a result, flu vaccines are only about 40-60 percent effective. A 50-percent effective vaccine for the much-more-dangerous Coronavirus would represent a longterm problem for humanity.

The second reason that the lack of mutations is encouraging is that, if the virus changed rapidly, it could become much more lethal in a short time. In the 1918 flu pandemic, the flu virus that initially swept the world didn’t do the most serious damage. It was a second, mutated strain in the fall of 1918 that was especially deadly. Thankfully, this possibility now seems unlikely in the current pandemic.

The other important lesson of the 1918 flu was the need for quarantines. Despite being called the “Spanish flu,” the virus apparently originated in the United States in March 1918 and spread around the world as American soldiers carried it with them on their way to war. Similar to Chinese obfuscations and lies about COVID-19, the US and British governments covered up the American outbreak at the time in the name of national security. Together with secrecy, the need for civilian workers to keep factories open to support the war effort prevented the widespread use of lockdowns and quarantines until it was too late. A third wave of the 1918 flu in the winter of 1919-20 was just as deadly as the second but less disastrous because fewer troops were being shuttled around the country and local governments started quarantining outbreaks.

The good news from the Coronavirus fight is that the virus is stable and not mutating. That will make finding an effective vaccine easier and quicker. More good news is that much of the country has adopted the right strategy of limiting social interactions to slow the spread of the virus. The bad news is that victory over the virus is going to take a while and behaviors will have to change in the meantime.

As Winston Churchill said in 1942, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Originally published on The Resurgent

CNN: Trump Is Turning Liberals Into Conspiracy Theorists

Sometimes the truth is so obvious that even mainstream media sources can no longer deny it. That was the case this week when CNN ran a story titled “Donald Trump is turning liberals into conspiracy theorists.”

The piece by editor-at-large Chris Cillizza cites four examples of liberal conspiracy theories that have emerged in recent weeks that Cillizza admits are patently false, misconstrued or blown out of proportion. These incidents include the alleged celebratory shipment of Bud Light to the Capitol building after the House passed the AHCA, the claim that the AHCA would make sexual assault a pre-existing condition that would cause victims to be denied health insurance coverage, the claim that the FCC was targeting Stephen Colbert and the claim that the White House chief usher was fired because she was a woman.

While I applaud the fact that Cillizza realizes that liberals are espousing conspiracy theories, a.k.a. fake news, he is off base in his assumption that liberal conspiracy theories are a recent phenomenon that was initiated by Trump Derangement Syndrome. To disprove Cillizza’s hypotheses, we only need to recall the behavior of liberals during the presidency of George W. Bush.

The granddaddy of modern conspiracy theories was the 9/11 “Truth” movement. A Public Policy poll on the eighth anniversary of the September 11 attacks asked the question, “Do you think President Bush intentionally allowed the 9/11 attacks to take place because he wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?” Twenty-seven percent of liberals polled answered “yes” compared to 10 percent of conservatives and 12 percent of moderates. Liberal 9/11 conspiracy theorists were given respectability by filmmaker Michael Moore in his 2004 film, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” a purported documentary that won a bevy of awards.

Not all liberals bought in to Moore’s accusations, however. Christopher Hitchens amusingly trashed the movie in Slate. “To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability,” he wrote. “To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental.”

A separate Public Policy poll found that almost three out of four Democrats believed that President Bush “intentionally misled” the public about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction as late as 2013. Many liberals still hold this view in spite of the fact that the New York Times detailed the discovery of “roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs” after the invasion of Iraq. The Times report detailed how American and Iraqi soldiers were exposed to “nerve or mustard agents” as they secured the country.

The Bush era gave birth to several other liberal conspiracy theories as well. Among them were the claim that Dick Cheney was a “puppet master” manipulating President Bush while Bush himself was variously seen as both an incompetent boob and an evil genius. The Washington Post noted in 2014 that liberals were just as likely to believe that Bush committed voter fraud in 2004 as conservatives were to believe that Obama committed voter fraud in 2012.

The purported conservative conspiracy about Barack Obama’s background, championed for years by Donald Trump, has its roots with an apparent liberal as well. Andy Martin, a failed lawyer and self-proclaimed consumer activist, allegedly made the first claims that Obama was closet Muslim in 2004. Martin got his start in politics as an intern for US Senator Paul Douglas (D-Ill.) and first ran for public office as a Democrat. Martin ran for president in the Republican primary in 2000 where he ran ads accusing George W. Bush of using cocaine, notes the New York Times, another conspiracy picked up by liberals.

Liberal conspiracy theories don’t stop there. Two large anti-science conspiracy theories are promulgated by liberals and have been for years. Liberal anti-corporate and environmentalist attitudes come together in conspiracies about GMOs and Monsanto. In 2014, Manny Schewitz complained on Forward Progressives that many liberals were “denying science” and refusing to listen to liberal icons Neil deGrasse Tyson and Jon Stewart when they ridiculed GMO conspiracy claims.

Likewise, the Washington Post in 2014 noted that anti-vaxxers, people who reject the science that vaccines are safe and effective, are concentrated in liberal communities. Seth Mnookin, a journalist who has covered the anti-vaccination conspiracy, noted that you only had to go visit a Whole Foods to find anti-vaxxers.

No discussion of conspiracy theories would be complete without mentioning chemtrails or the Kennedy assassination. A Public Policy poll found that roughly equivalent percentages of Obama and Romney voters believed that the government spread chemicals through aircraft exhaust. Twice as many Obama voters were “not sure” and potentially open to the possibility. With respect to JFK, the common theory that the president was murdered by the CIA reflects a liberal mistrust of the national security apparatus.  

So, when liberals go off the deep end with outrageous claims about Republican health care reform legislation or Donald Trump, contrary to what Chris Cillizza says, it’s nothing new. For every Jade Helm story on the right, there is an equally outrageous and opposite belief from the other side of the political spectrum. A major difference between the two is that right-wing conspiracy theories and “alternative facts” are largely confined to fringe sites like Infowars and Breitbart while liberal conspiracy theories are often given serious treatment by mainstream media outlets.

Originally published on The Resurgent