Welcome to my ongoing review of questions challenging my “journalistic integrity” (except I’m not a journalist), in which I use their challenge to challenge theirs right back. NewsGuard doesn’t guard news, as we all know, proven in real time by these posts showing what they ask me and my response.
Here are the links to part one and part two, if you missed them. Both are essential reading on the game that is being played and how you should respond if you happen to be a small operation like this one. Political blogs with reach but small operational footprints are thought to be easy targets, but I do accept that we are influential enough that the partisan sehemers at NewsGuard even bother to reach out year after year to try and trip us up.
I feel confident that the same sense they use to rate organizations like LAT and NYT with excellent ratings despite leaving out truth, facts, and opposing opinions as a matter of policy applies to measuring my calculated rebuttals that expose the hypocrisy. We’re rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, as it were, and what I say will not affect the outcome.
Anyway, welcome to part 3.
Original NewsGuard query:
3) An October 2025 article, headlined “PAYNE: COVID Carnage,” stated that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines may have killed at least 470,000 people.
The article stated, “The plot becomes more frightening from Independent analyst Steve Kirsch’s revealing studies about alarming excess death rates: that Pfizer’s shots alone might have caused more than 470,000 American deaths — a number that, if accurate, ‘would make the mRNA rollout the deadliest government-sanctioned medical intervention in modern history.’”
In fact, only nine deaths have been attributed to COVID vaccines, a spokesperson for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told NewsGuard in a January 2025 email, and all of those deaths were linked to the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine which has not been available in the U.S. since May 2023.
The article was referencing an April 30, 2025, Substack article written by Steve Kirsch, an anti-vaccine activist with no medical background. Kirsch in turn based his claim on an April 29, 2025, preprint – a preliminary study that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal – compared deaths from all causes among 1.4 million Florida adults after receiving either a Pfizer COVID vaccine or a Moderna COVID vaccine. The research did conclude that the mortality rate was higher among Pfizer vaccine recipients than those who received the Moderna vaccine within 12 months of vaccination.
Kirsch’s April 30, 2025, article then calculated that the Pfizer vaccine had killed 470,000 people by assuming that any difference in deaths between Pfizer and Moderna vaccine recipients in Florida were deaths caused by the Pfizer vaccine, which he then extrapolated to the entire U.S.
However, the preprint itself did not say that the Pfizer vaccine caused any deaths. Health experts told NewsGuard that because the preprint only compared one vaccinated group to another and did not include a group of unvaccinated people, the study could not make any conclusions about vaccine safety, including whether vaccination caused any deaths.
University of Lisbon immunology professor Dr. Marc Veldhoen told NewsGuard in a May 2025 email: “The preprint does not investigate vaccine safety. It cannot do this since there is no unvaccinated group.” Veldhoen said Kirsch’s claim about Pfizer’s COVID vaccine causing 470,000 deaths “is not what the preprint shows or can conclude.”
Does Granite Grok have any comment on this apparently countervailing information and why it was not included in the article?
My response.
NewsGuard: An October 2025 article, headlined “PAYNE: COVID Carnage,” stated that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines may have killed at least 470,000 people.
Mr. Payne is an Op-Ed writer and not a registered contributor of GraniteGrok.com. He has a byline because that is how our updated authors plug-in works. We publish reader op-eds as a feature to share public opinion. Having said that, Mr. Payne (who frequently submits) enjoys the same wide latitude I give our featured authors. He is also citing sources like The New American, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Steve Kirsch, and not really making claims of his own. Readers are encouraged to follow whatever rabbit holes they find and rebut claims at their leisure.
And while it remains unclear how many, if any deaths, can be 100% attributed directly to the COVID vaccines, the misinformation and disinformation circulated by politicians, public health officials and mass media during the ‘pandemic,’ encourages and entitles people to their speculations (especially given human history and medical experimentation which many feel the response to COVID was), when citing observational research (and pre prints) like this one.
As for why it wasn’t included in the article, he is an op-ed contributor not a scientific or public interest researcher, but since you brought it up, what of the hundreds or thousands of COVID-Era articles (and) why didn’t major media and main stream press include contrary scientific evidence on vaccine safety, side-effects, response to the protocols or treatments, complications, the wealth of data pre-COVID regarding masks, natural immunity, and on and on.
GraniteGrok.com does not pretend to be unbiased news. If NewsGuard would like us or anyone else to take them seriously, they should stop giving high scores to publications that, to this day, have yet to correct the record on a wide range of matters presented to the public as “news” and not opinion
Best,
The last two items of concern presented to me by NewsGuard will be covered together and are the brief responses of the lot. One is another articleby Mr. Payne, and the last was a general concern over the lack of corrections to “staff-written” stories.
Feel free to guess how that went, or just wait a few days and I’ll tell you.
Thanks for reading and serving as our fact-checkers, comic relief, concerned citizens, and as supporters, either as fans, link sharers, content creators, commenters, donors, or any combination of those things. We appreciate all of it.
