It’s been too long since I last talked about fact-checking. Dealing with the aftermath of a disputed election and a failed insurrection can be a bit distracting. But yeah, it didn’t take long for the disinformation pipeline to put its focus on President Joe Biden if my Facebook feed is any indication. Many of the claims are recycled from the campaign.

Sorta sad, really, that these people can’t be troubled to make up new lies … oh, wait, I spoke too soon!

One of those claims is that Biden botched the H1N1 vaccine in 2009 (a claim repeatedly sent in by a retired doctor[!] that is nearly word-for-word a Trump talking point).

Biden went too far by saying that he led the response, as his primary role was behind the scenes. Says Politico: “Biden’s role, while significant, was not equivalent to leading the response. He was the administration’s main liaison to governors and Congress and succeeded in securing funding from skeptical leaders.”

Regardless of his level of involvement, the delay in the vaccine was not due to political considerations at all, but simply realities in developing a vaccine for flu (which, though the illness has similar symptoms, isn’t the same as a coronavirus) based on time-consuming incubation in eggs. “That meant there would be a lag in preparing the seed stocks of virus that manufacturers needed to start production,” wrote Natasha Korecki of Politico. “But the Obama administration made a significant mistake: [Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen] Sebelius’ team at HHS nonetheless announced that if all went as planned, they should have 100 million doses ready for use by mid-October. That was consistent with promises made by the vaccine manufacturers, who had actually contracted for 120 million doses by October, but before the delays in the seed stocks. All did not go as planned. The slowness in growing the virus needed for the vaccine was compounded by a range of additional setbacks, including repeated glitches in manufacturing the drug.”

The covid-19 vaccine is based in different technology involving messenger RNA, which meant it was able to be made and tested in less time, though the number of available doses was overpromised, as it was with H1N1.

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I think with covid-19 and other issues, a lot of us are hoping that we can get back to relying more on facts than feelings and conspiracy theories.

That sigh you might have heard about noon last Wednesday was the relief of fact-checkers who are already getting a well-deserved rest from the chaos of the Trump years. The Washington Post Fact Checker put Donald Trump’s final tally of false or misleading claims over four years at 30,573, about half of them his last year. On Nov. 2 alone, he made 503 false claims in comparison with 492 in the first 100 days of his presidency. The average over his term was about 21 erroneous claims a day—a blistering pace for anyone dedicated to facts to try to match and stay on top of.

Biden taking office doesn’t mean that fact-checkers are taking the next four years off. Just as they did with Barack Obama and with Trump, they are checking statements and tracking promises made by Biden. FactCheck, just as it did with Obama and Trump, will keep track of and report on the numbers involved in Biden’s presidency (jobs, murder rate, border apprehensions, etc.); perhaps now it will be able to get back on its quarterly schedule on those numbers, which it had trouble doing with Trump because of his output of falsehoods. Of course, these organizations will also keep fact-checking other notable personalities and social media posts when needed to try to keep disinformation/misinformation at a minimum.

Still, you could almost feel the relief in the lede of Eugene Kiely, Robert Farley and D’Angelo Gore’s post on Biden’s inaugural speech on FactCheck.org: “Returning to a time when inaugural addresses promised unity and hope, but few facts, the newly sworn-in President Joe Biden delivered a traditional speech at his inauguration that offered little for fact-checkers. When he did offer us some facts to check, the 46th president of the United States largely hit his marks on domestic threats, covid-19 and the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913 in a 21-minute speech.”

When it’s mostly quibbles, that’s a good thing. Let fact-checkers get some rest before the first joint address to Congress. That’s usually the biggest fact-checking job of the year, and these guys have worked nonstop over the past four years.

On Biden’s executive order pulling the Keystone pipeline permit, which is another topic I’ve seen a lot on lately on social media, Agence France-Presse (AFP) found that social media posts inflated job losses to come from the action, ranging from 11,000 to 83,000. (I know, shocking that people would exaggerate on social media.)

The Canada-based oil company said that 1,000 union jobs would be lost immediately in the U.S. and Canada. The company had estimated in October that pipeline employment was expected to reach 11,000 Americans in 2021. However, as PolitiFact (which deemed the claim half-true) found, the majority of the jobs involved would be temporary, lasting four to eight months, which means they wouldn’t be counted as full employment: “In the report, the agency wrote that 10,400 estimated positions would be for seasonal construction work lasting four to eight-month periods. Since the State Department defines ‘job’ as ‘one position that is filled for one year,’ that would equate to approximately 3,900 jobs over a two-year period.”

Not that people who disbelieve fact-checks care. For people conditioned to believe that only the sources that confirm their beliefs are trustworthy, no amount of fact-checking and evidence is enough. While supposedly the backfire effect (people digging in on misinformation after being fact-checked) is rare, experience tells me it’s very real and, I’d argue, at least partially responsible for what happened Jan. 6. It didn’t matter to the insurrectionists who breached the Capitol that their claims had been disproven and rebuked. Their “truth” was all that mattered. That “truth,” of course, tended to be Trump talking points repeated ad infinitum, as if repetition makes something true. Helpful hint: It doesn’t.

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As they have since coming into their own in the run-up to the 2008 elections, the most trustworthy fact-checkers link to their sources. That means that when you read a fact-check somewhere like AFP, PolitiFact or FactCheck (among others), you’ll be able to find the source material at the click of a link, which may be embedded within the fact-check, in a list at the end, or both (I link to my sources as well when possible). You can then read the material for yourself to determine how much faith you should put in the analysis. The most reliable checkers also are open about their funding sources (which for many of them is donations from readers rather than political groups). Fact-checkers that link only to themselves and/or opinion pieces and that are cagey about their funding (especially if they keep talking about how transparent they are, apparently hoping you won’t notice they didn’t give you the information) … well, I’d tread warily.

There’s likely to be something messy on the floor just waiting for you to step in it.

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I find it necessary at the moment to remind readers that I’m not a political columnist, as a few readers keep insisting that I am when they implore me to write on one government misdeed or another. Nertz to that.

I sometimes write about the sociology of politics, focusing on how politics has crept into every facet of our lives, and about fact-checking. My opinion on party politics doesn’t really matter, so if you want me to go hard after some politician, you’ve come to the wrong place. Many independents like me tend to stay out of political scraps and observe, speaking only when necessary, such as when people refuse to accept reality because it didn’t go their way.

What I’m interested in is life itself and how we relate to each other. One of those ways is through words, which is why so many of my columns focus on them.

Which brings me to a request from a friend, who’d like me to talk about the origins of well-known phrases (like “curiosity killed the cat”). Have one you want me to check out? Email me at blooper@adgnewsroom.com.

I may mention you in a future column, and won’t even make fun of you. (I reserve the right to change my mind on that last part, depending on how much you amuse and/or annoy me.)