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Poynter
Fact-checked by: Taiwan FactCheck Center
2021/09/08 | Taiwan, United States
FALSE: David Martin testified in Germany, indicating the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from the USA based on the evidence of a US-owned coronavirus patent.
Explanation: David Martin has previously made several false COVID-19 information. The alleged patent is irrelevent to SARS-CoV-2.
Read the Full Article (Taiwan FactCheck Center)
This false claim originated from: Global Times, YouTube
The #CoronavirusFacts database records fact-checks published since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak. The pandemic and its consequences are constantly evolving and data that was accurate weeks or even days ago might have changed. Remember to check the date when the fact-check you are reading was published before sharing it.
https://www.poynter.org/?ifcn_misinformation=david-martin-testified-in-germany-indicating-the-sars-cov-2-virus-originated-from-the-usa-based-on-the-evidence-of-a-us-owned-coronavirus-patent
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Excerpts from:
Did the US government intentionally release the COVID-19 virus in Wuhan, to trigger a global pandemic so that people will accept vaccines?!
Take a look at the viral claim, and find out what the facts really are!
Claim : US Intentionally Released COVID Virus In Wuhan!
People are sharing an article by The Standard newspaper in Hong Kong, in which David Martin claimed that the US government intentionally released the COVID-19 virus in Wuhan, to trigger a global pandemic so that people will accept vaccines!
The article is being shared not only by anti-vaccination activists and conspiracy theorists, but also pro-CCP netizens and the Chinese 50 Cent Army (wumao, 五毛) as “evidence” that the COVID-19 pandemic was caused by the United States, and not China.
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Truth : US Did Not Release COVID-19 Virus In Wuhan!
This appears to be yet another example of FAKE NEWS circulating on WhatsApp and social media platforms like TikTok and Twitter, and here are the reasons why!
Fact #1 : International COVID Summit III Was Not Organised By EU Parliament
The article wrongly states that the International COVID Summit III was organised by the European Parliament.
As I explained in my previous article, the International COVID Summit III was not an official EU Parliament event. It appears to be a private conference organised by COVID-19 conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccination activists.
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Fact #3 : Coronavirus Was First Isolated In 1930s
David Martin said that the first coronavirus as a model of a pathogen was isolated in 1965. Well, I have no idea what he meant by “as a model of a pathogen”, but that’s wrong on several counts.
- first coronavirus sample (IBV) was isolated in 1930s
- second coronavirus sample (MHV) was isolated in 1947
- third coronavirus sample (B814) was isolated in 1961
- fourth coronavirus sample (229-E) was isolated in 1966
- all four virus samples were determined to be from same group, and named “coronavirus” in 1967
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Fact #4 : Vaccines Work Even When Virus Mutates
All viruses can mutate when they replicate, just like how all animals evolve through reproduction. Just because a virus mutates does not mean that vaccines stop working.
Vaccines are training programs that teach our immune system how to identify the actual virus, and make its own antibodies against it. It’s like training your army by showing them how the enemy soldiers look like and behave, so they can train and prepare for war.
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Fact #6 : Most COVID-19 Vaccines Developed By Foreign Companies
The claim that the US government would create a pandemic to drive demand for vaccines is ludicrous. For one thing – big pharmaceutical companies are public-listed companies, and many are based outside of the United States.
More importantly – most COVID-19 vaccines were developed by foreign companies:
- Only the Moderna Spikevax vaccine was developed in the United States
- The Pfizer COMIRNATY vaccine was developed by German company, BioNTech
- The AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine was developed by Oxford University, and AstraZeneca is a UK company.
- The Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine was developed by Janssen Vaccines in the Netherlands.
- The Sinovac, Sinopharm, CanSino COVID-19 vaccines were developed in China.
So the conspiracy theory that the United States created the COVID-19 pandemic for profit is absurd…
https://www.techarp.com/facts/us-release-covid-19-virus-wuhan/
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FactCheck.org
New ‘Plandemic’ Video Peddles Misinformation, Conspiracies
By Saranac Hale Spencer, Jessica McDonald and Angelo Fichera
Posted on August 21, 2020 | Updated on June 29, 2021
The second part of “Plandemic” — a documentary-style video that presents a sweeping conspiracy theory about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, patents and vaccines — landed on Aug. 18, spinning together many of the falsehoods about the disease that we’ve been debunking for months, plus some new misleading claims.
The 75-minute video expands on the first installment, which captured widespread attention in early May. At the time, much of the U.S. was under various stay-at-home orders in an effort to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus about two months after the World Health Organization designated COVID-19 a pandemic. The first installment spread a number of false and misleading claims made by Judy Mikovits, a researcher known for her discredited work on chronic fatigue syndrome.
The new video, called “Plandemic: Indoctornation,” offers a more far-reaching conspiratorial take on the pandemic, with an underlying theme that the media can’t be trusted. It suggests without proof that the novel coronavirus was man-made and intentionally released.
The video is heavy on innuendo and features David Martin, a financial analyst and self-help entrepreneur who has a YouTube channel that has pushed some of the same conspiracy theories.
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David Martin and Patent Claims
If Event 201 is the backbone of the conspiracy theory in “Plandemic,” then David Martin is the central character. He’s featured throughout the video, making claims primarily about patents.
Martin runs a company called M-CAM, which analyzes patents and intellectual property to estimate the investment value of companies.
M-CAM has five investment companies as clients, managing assets of $1.1 million, according to a recent statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Not big in investments, seems more like another guy using predictive modeling as a selling tool for many types of information,” Suzanne Lynch told FactCheck.org in an email, after looking through M-CAM’s SEC filings. Lynch has worked on Wall Street and is now a professor of economic crime at Utica College.
Samuel Rosen, an assistant professor of finance at Temple University’s Fox School of Business, similarly described M-CAM, broadly, as an investment research company and noted in an email to FactCheck.org that it appears Martin manages a small hedge fund, too.
But Martin has also peddled conspiracy theories over the years. He published a novel in 2011, which he claimed was based on real events, alleging a rigged 2008 presidential election that was somehow tied to the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Since the pandemic began, he has used his YouTube channel to promote COVID-19 conspiracy theories. He repeats many of those claims in “Plandemic: Indoctornation.”
In one video from April, Martin referred to Event 201, saying: “COVID-19 is a branded campaign … that is funded by people in the software, data sciences and social media industry. That’s who built COVID-19.”
The gist of Martin’s video was that wealthy philanthropists like Bill Gates, technology companies, pharmaceutical companies and global health organizations colluded to create a virus that would force governments to fund research and development of vaccines and therapies in order to enrich themselves.
For “Plandemic,” though, Martin shifts his focus away from “the software, data sciences and social media industry.” Instead, he takes aim largely at government entities.
Martin claims that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saw “the possibility of a gold strike” when the SARS epidemic arose in 2003.
“They saw that a virus they knew could be easily manipulated was something that was very valuable,” he says, pointing to a patent filed by the CDC that year. The patent covered the isolated virus that causes SARS and ways to detect it.
Skimming across the screen while Martin makes that claim is a headline for a November 2003 news story about the race to patent the virus. However, that story doesn’t support his argument. It actually explains that the CDC wasn’t pursuing the patent for profit. Rather, it was doing so to keep others from monopolizing research.
“The whole purpose of the patent is to prevent folks from controlling the technology,” the story quotes CDC spokesman Llelwyn Grant as saying. “This is being done to give the industry and other researchers reasonable access to the samples.”
Similarly, the director of the CDC at the time, Dr. Julie Gerberding, told reporters that filing for the patent was “a protective measure to make sure that the access to the virus remains open for everyone.”
“The concern that the federal government is looking at right now is that we could be locked out of this opportunity to work with this virus if it’s patented by someone else, and so by initiating steps to secure patent rights, we assure that we will be able to continue to make the virus and the products from the virus available in the public domain, and that we can continue to promote the rapid technological transfer of this biomedical information into tools and products that are useful to patients,” Gerberding said in a May 2003 telebriefing.
So, Martin’s claim is at odds with the CDC’s publicly stated motivation, and he offers no evidence to support his argument.
Next, Martin claims that federal law wouldn’t have allowed for a patent on that isolated virus.
Again, he’s wrong.
Instead of reading from U.S. patent law, as he says he is in the video, Martin reads from a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision. That’s an important distinction since the decision, which changed one aspect of patent law that’s relevant here, came 10 years after the CDC filed for a patent related to the virus that causes SARS.
“Nature is prohibited from being patented,” Martin says, claiming that he was quoting from a section of patent law. Building on that, he claims, “either SARS, coronavirus, was manufactured, therefore making a patent on it legal, or it was natural, therefore making a patent on it illegal.”
But that’s a false dichotomy.
While the Supreme Court did find that “[a] naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated,” that decision came a decade after the CDC sought the patent.
“Isolated genes (that is, genes extracted from a longer DNA sequence) used to be patentable in the past because the courts decided that just the act of extracting them and removing the non-coding segments caused enough of a modification to turn them into patent-eligible things,” Mario Biagioli, a professor at UCLA School of Law, told FactCheck.org in an email. “No more. A few years ago the Supreme Court decided that simply isolating a gene did not change it enough. It remained a ‘product of nature’ and therefore unpatentable.”
So, claiming that the patent is either illegal or the virus was “manufactured” is wrong.
After that, Martin takes his claim one step further, saying: “If it was manufactured, it was a violation of biological and chemical weapons treaties and laws. If it was natural, filing a patent on it was illegal. In either outcome, both are illegal.”
That’s not right, either, said Arti Rai, a professor at Duke University School of Law, in a phone interview with FactCheck.org.
In order for scientists to do research on either diseases or biological weapons, they need access to the underlying biological material and there are laws governing who can do that research and in what facilities, said Rai. It’s not necessarily illegal to possess such material.
Also, she noted, something that is illegal to use, like a chemical or biological weapon, isn’t illegal to patent.
“Lots of things have been patented over the years that would be illegal to use,” said Rai. She gave the example of devices for taking illegal drugs, explaining that having a patent on something doesn’t give you the right to use it.
Altogether, the statements Martin makes about legal issues are inaccurate, Rai said, and the way the video presents connections related to those statements are inaccurate, too.
“They try to connect dots in a way that is misleading,” she said.
It’s worth repeating, the 2003 patent filing Martin references involves a different virus than the one that causes COVID-19.
But he isn’t the first to make claims like this. Falsehoods tying unrelated patents to the novel coronavirus have been circulating almost as long as COVID-19 has been around. We wrote about some in January.
Read this very long article here
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/08/new-plandemic-video-peddles-misinformation-conspiracies/
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Health Feedback
Reviews of articles by: David Martin
COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are safe; they don’t alter our DNA and aren’t subjected to federal regulation on bioweapons
CLAIM
“We are allowing human organisms to become bioweapon factories”
SOURCE: Stew Peters, David Martin, Stew Peters Show
Published: 01 Apr 2022
VERDICT
Vaccines protect people from diseases, but don’t always prevent disease transmission; research ongoing to determine if COVID-19 vaccines stop transmission
CLAIM
The COVID-19 RNA vaccine “is not a vaccine”; a vaccine has to disrupt transmission by CDC and FDA standards; the vaccine “activate[s] the cell to become a pathogen-manufacturing site”
SOURCE: David Martin, New Earth Project
Published: 12 Jan 2021
https://healthfeedback.org/authors/david-martin/
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weehingthong 