Associated Press Responds to Honest Media Criticisms
And Honest Media Keeps the Dialogue Going
On January 16, Honest Media sent an email to the CEO of the Associated Press (AP), attorney Daisy Veerasingham, asking the news organization to end all funding it receives from the Lilly Endowment.
On January 18, Ms. Veerasingham responded to us. And today, Honest Media replied back.
Ms. Veerasingham made two major points in her email to us (included in full at the end of this post) which were that (1) The Eli Lilly endowment is a separate organization from the Eli Lilly Corporation, and (2) AP does not allow any donor to have a say in their editorial decisions.
We responded to Ms. Veerasingham and the AP with the following email sent today, January 26, at 8:20am ET:
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Dear Daisy Veerasingham,
I would like to sincerely thank you for your response to my email. It is greatly appreciated to see that you and the Associated Press (AP) are taking the concerns of Honest Media seriously.
Over the last few years, America has seen a significant drop in the integrity of mainstream journalism, and the AP has been no exception to that trend. AP’s reporting has been frequently filled with untrue stories that read like Big Pharma or political propaganda. Some bias in reporting is inevitable, but AP reporting has contained many untruths and rather than admit and correct these errors, your organization appears to be doubling down on a strategy of false reporting.
When we at Honest Media see this pattern of producing pharma propaganda, and we also see the funding that AP gets from the Lilly Endowment, you can forgive us for suspecting a link between the two. Our goals are to have the AP clean up its reporting and editorial process, and admit and correct past mistakes. We would like to engage with you in a dialogue about the false reporting at the AP and develop a plan to address these problems. We suspect that the corrupting influence of the funding from the Lilly Endowment may make these fixes difficult, but we would be happy to have you prove us wrong on this point.
Examining the Lilly Foundation
While your response to my original email pointed out that Eli Lilly and the Lilly Endowment are legally separate entities, it must be noted one does not exist without the other. And clearly the endowment exists solely because the corporation existed first.
Additionally, the Lilly Endowment owns over 10% of Eli Lilly’s stock as of September 2023 — a larger stake than is held by Wall Street behemoths Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street. Corporations and billionaires often create non-profits and endowments that benefit their bottom line. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, follows this model: Bill Gates donates billions to develop and promote vaccines every year, while at the same time noting that vaccines are the most profitable products he has ever invested in, giving a 20 to 1 return on investment.
So it is not far-fetched to suspect that money donated from the Lilly Endowment would be beneficial for Eli Lilly. Of course the Lilly Endowment will give money to causes that advance the goals of its parent company, and the goals of the entire Big Pharma industry. And given this suspicion, it also begs the question of why AP consistently produces reports that appear to be an arm of Big Pharma propaganda?
Such questionable reporting includes all of the following:
AP Apologist for Vaccine Passports
In May of 2021 AP published an “explainer” for how vaccine passports are going to work for global travel without ever challenging the necessity for such technology nor the dangerous implications for civil rights. Reporter Kelvin Chan dismisses such concerns as “unfounded fears that (vaccine passports) will be used to control people, restrict freedom and erode privacy.” This report looks far more like Big Pharma PR than objective reporting.
RFK Jr.
AP has repeatedly targeted Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with the extremely biased position that he is an “anti-vaxxer,” even going so far as to say he has harmed people although no evidence was provided of anyone he has caused direct harm to. The report claiming Kennedy caused harm to individuals was a completely biased hit-piece that did not quote a single person defending him or representing his point of view. How can you claim AP is unbiased while publishing pieces like this one?
It is particularly eyebrow raising that AP is blatantly attacking Kennedy when one of the first wars he rightly waged against Big Pharma was aimed directly at none other than Eli Lilly!
For years Kennedy has painstakingly documented the harms of thimerosal, a vaccine additive containing mercury that is sold by Lilly under the name merthiolate. This culminated in a groundbreaking book published in 2014 by Kennedy called Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak: The Evidence Supporting the Immediate Removal of Mercury–a Known Neurotoxin–from Vaccines.
This book is an extremely scholarly publication that reviewed over 500 scientific references. Due to Kennedy’s work in this area, and that of many grassroots activists, thimerosal is no longer used in childhood vaccines (with 2 notable exceptions). The AP often calls Kennedy an “anti-vaxxer” but the truth is that he is anti-neurotoxin. Kennedy has fought for years to get mercury out of fish, and he often likes to remind everyone that no one has ever called him “anti-fish.”
PR for COVID Shot Being 90% Effective Claim
In November 2020, AP stated that Pfizer’s COVID vaccine was “90% effective” and didn’t even say what the word effective meant. AP simply took the word of Pfizer that this claim was true without knowing what was true at all! Buried deep in the report in the 11th paragraph, reporters Lauran Neergaard and Linda Johnson revealed, “Pfizer released no specific breakdowns, but for the vaccine to be 90% effective, nearly all the infections must have occurred in placebo recipients. The study is continuing, and Pfizer cautioned that the protection rate might change as more COVID-19 cases are added to the calculations.”
So to be clear, Pfizer provided no data by which AP reporters could verify the 90% claim from the company was true, and then your reporters went on to speculate what *must* be true even though they had no clue what was true because they had no data to base it on. Does spouting Pfizer’s talking points without verifying them represent gold-standard AP reporting practices? Is this what you mean when saying AP must be an “unbiased factual news source”?
Additionally, the AP gave no definition of what “protection rate” refers to, nor did your reporters ask Pfizer to clarify. Does it mean stopping transmission of SARS CoV-2? Stopping deaths of those who got the shot? Lessening symptoms? The AP didn’t care to even ask such questions regarding one of the most critical public health issues in all of human history. This report reads like a press release straight from Pfizer’s public relations department. We now know the COVID vaccines were never required to show the vaccine prevented transmission in order to be released to the public. In fact one year later, in October of 2022, AP released its own “fact check” saying “Pfizer never claimed to have studied the issue (of transmission) before the vaccine’s market release.”
Why didn’t AP ask this question of Pfizer back in November of 2021?
Reports like this were critical in performing a sleight-of-hand by the mainstream media that fooled the populace into believing COVID shots stopped transmission of the virus when they did not.
Ivermectin Horse Dewormer Disinfo
AP reported that Ivermectin was a horse dewormer and there is “no evidence” that it is safe and effective for use in treating COVID-19 in humans. This claim was part of a major Big Pharma propaganda campaign to make people think Ivermectin is not used in humans when it is. The drug has won the Nobel Prize for ending two human endemic diseases, and billions of doses have been safely given to humans across the world as an antiviral and antiparasitic treatment. AP’s link in this article claiming there is “no evidence” for Ivermectin’s use for COVID-19 is now a broken link to an old AP fact check that your organization has removed from publication with no mention as to why. Again, does this too represent gold standard reporting practices from AP?
In direct contrast to AP’s reporting, there are over 100 peer reviewed scientific studies that show Ivermectin is, in fact, safe and effective in treating COVID-19. The definitive work on this subject has been written by Dr. Pierre Kory, titled The War on Ivermectin. Dr. Kory was a frontline emergency care physician during the COVID crisis.
The most critical piece of missing information here is that there could have never been an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) issued for any COVID vaccine if repurposed drugs like Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine were effectively treating the new illness. These drugs have expired patents so they can no longer provide big profits for Big Pharma. Therefore, Big Pharma had a motive to discredit these drugs in order to get EUA approval for COVID vaccines to improve their financial returns. But readers would never suspect any such a thing if they were relying solely on AP reporting; such a potential conflict of interest should not be ignored by reputable news organizations.
Politicizing Natural Immunity
In November 2021, when data was being published in peer reviewed journals showing natural immunity to be robust and long-lasting, the AP reported the following statement without quoting or sourcing a single scientist who held a different opinion. “Scientists acknowledge that people previously infected with COVID-19 have some level of immunity but that vaccines offer a more consistent level of protection. Natural immunity is also far from a one-size-fits-all scenario, making it complicated to enact sweeping exemptions to vaccines.” This reporting additionally failed to mention an Israeli study from August 2021 (four months before the AP story in question), published in Science Magazine, had already found that having COVID once confers “much greater immunity” than getting a vaccine.
Today, the idea that COVID vaccines “offer a more consistent level of protection” is laughable. Hundreds of thousands of scientists did and still do hold the opinion that natural immunity to COVID is superior to vaccine induced immunity. Instead of being the “unbiased factual news source” that you say AP must be, the issue was politicized by your reporter Anthony Izaguirre.
We have given ample evidence as to why the AP’s reporting on these topics has in fact been biased and dismissive of reasonable people’s questions and differing opinions, while spinning facts and evidence to create a pro-Pharma bias. Some news organizations are now taking a closer look at what really happened during COVID, however the AP continues to show significant bias while also accepting funding with ties to a major Big Pharma corporation.
Given all of the above, we ask you once again, for the sake of the AP's reputation, to immediately end all connection to Eli Lilly through underwriting from the Lilly Endowment. We would be more than happy to meet with you and your team to discuss this very critical matter further.
Kind Regards,
Michael Kane
Managing Editor Honest Media
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Below is the full email from Daisy Veerasingham to Michael Kane sent on January 18, 2024 at 2:07pm ET which prompted the above long response:
Dear Mr. Kane,
Thank you for your email. The AP accepts philanthropic funding from about two dozen philanthropic foundations, including the private foundation Lilly Endowment Inc. We do not accept funding from the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company.Funding from the Lilly Endowment supports AP’s coverage of religion globally, as well as philanthropy and the nonprofit world.
As is the case any time AP accepts philanthropic funding in support of its journalism, AP retains complete editorial control. Our coverage is not influenced by funders in any way.
I encourage you to review AP’s standards for working with outside groups, which spell out the processes we have in place to ensure AP maintains its editorial independence: https://www.ap.org/about/standards-for-working-with-outside-groups/
Best regards,
Daisy