Pope Francis has attacked alleged “misinformation” regarding the COVID-19 vaccines as being a human rights violation, praising fact-checking organizations.
On Friday, Pope Francis claimed that an “infodemic” of misinformation about COVID-19 and the vaccines was spreading around the world just as quickly as the disease itself, which Francis described as “a distortion of reality based on fear.”
Francis, who earlier this year described criticism of the vaccines as “baseless,” said that it was a “human right” for people to be properly informed about the world around them. However, instead of encouraging people to research the truth for themselves, the Pope argued that free choice and open information leads to “confusion” for people.
Therefore, he continued, “correct information must be ensured above all to those who are less equipped, to the weakest and to those who are most vulnerable.” Without an “ethical corrective” to decide what is true or not, “algorithms” will lead people to “dangerous forms of radicalization.”
The address from the Pope was promoted by the International Catholic Media Consortium on COVID-19 Vaccines. The group is headed by the Catholic media outlet Aleteia, along with other European media outlets, and has created the “Catholic Fact Checking” project, designed to give Catholic media outlets “unbiased” and “fact-checked” information on the vaccines.
“You yourselves have set as a goal the unmasking of fake news and partial or misleading information about Covid-19 vaccines, and have begun to do so by networking different Catholic media and involving various experts,” Pope Francis said, praising the group. “Your initiative was born as a Consortium that seeks to be together for the truth. Thank you, thank you for this.”
In March last year, the Catholic Fact-Checking project was chosen as one of 11 projects to receive up to $3 million from the Google News Initiative’s Open Fund, designed to help more media outlets correct “fake news” online.
Ironically, other Catholic media outlets have fallen foul of of Big Tech regulations when talking about the vaccines in a way that it is not officially sanctioned, with Life Site News having all of its social media platforms shut down last year for breaching COVID-19 misinformation policies.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, one of Francis’s biggest critics, slammed him last year as a “zealous cooperator” of the Great Reset agenda pushed by globalist organizations such as the WEF, and that he was presiding over the “demolition” of the Catholic Church in order to replace it with an order based on “Masonic inspiration.”
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