During Friday’s broadcast of The Five, Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld proclaimed that he is “pro-disinformation” after a co-host recalled her encounters with online disinformation regarding the effect of the COVID-19 vaccine on pregnancies.
Jessica Tarlov described how one piece of disinformation that received significant traction was that receiving the vaccine while pregnant would increase the likelihood of miscarrying.
“That’s obviously something that was incredibly scary. I ended up getting vaccinated while I was pregnant and my doctor assured me that it was fine,” she said.
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“Making sure that information like that is not getting out there is a worthy cause,” Tarlov continued. “And I’m not for censorship. I am for carefully looking at these kinds of things because there are people who are getting bad information over social media. Whether it is they would have cared about Hunter Biden’s laptop — I care about that a lot less than about medicines that can help save their lives or could pass immunity onto their babies, which is what happened. My daughter was born with antibodies because I got vaccinated while I was pregnant.”
The disinformation that Tarlov described originated from a small but influential group of people that the Center for Countering Digital Hate called “The Disinformation Dozen.” Its members included noted anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who predictably complained about censorship after his Facebook and Instagram accounts that spread false claims about vaccines were booted from those platforms.
And yet Greg Gutfeld, when asked by co-host Jeanine Pirro, followed up Tarlov’s remarks by claiming that “everybody in a way deserves a mulligan when you have a pandemic once every hundred years.”
“There’s going to be people that are initially going to be right, and then wrong, and then that’s going to change,” he said.
“I am pro-disinformation because one man’s disinformation is another person’s fact, right?” said Gutfeld, who advised viewers against receiving a COVID-19 booster shot during the Omicron variant surge last winter.
“A censor never says they’re a censor. They just say they’re concerned about your health,” he claimed. “And so they use medical information now as kind of their weaponry to start curtailing information. So, disinformation has now become the new hate speech, right? And they use health as a shield.”
Later in the discussion, both Gutfeld and Pirro were skeptical as to whether social media companies are able to monitor their platforms for the type of disinformation Tarlov described.
“How do you police that? Pirro asked. “I mean really.”
