These days, facts and truth have attained a new and highly elastic definition. There was Meghan’s (the Duchess of Sussex) claim to follow ‘her own truth’ (even if that involved statements submitted to the court now discovered to be not-quite-true).

There was Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway’s famous line, when defending the false statements made by Donald Trump’s administration about the crowd size at his 2016 inauguration, that theirs were simply ‘alternative facts.’

And of course, there is the term ‘fake news,’ made popular by President Trump and now lobbed so often at anyone or anything the person doing the lobbing happens to disagree with that US and UK news sources have essentially banned its use.

Close cousins of ‘fake news’ are ‘mis-information,’ ‘dis-information’ and even ‘mal-information’ – each a bit more insidious than the other.

Nowhere is this more evident than what is being published about Covid.

But they’re not coming from crazed conspiracy theorists, although there are many of those.  They’re not even coming from those attempting to question the official line about Covid.

They’re coming from the government agencies supposed to be helping us deal with Covid where we’re supposed to get the ‘true’ and not ‘alternative’ facts.

A few examples. My husband Bryan Hubbard has been studying the latest claims and ‘facts’ delivered to us by the government and medical journals about Covid.

He discovered the following:

Amanda Pritchard, chief executive of the UK’s National Health Service, recently went on record to claim that there were 14 times the number of Covid patients in hospital today as there were this time last year.

In fact, Bryan wrote, 30 percent fewer people have been hospitalized in the UK compared to the same time last year.

Then, another guardian of the truth, the UK’s Office for National Statistics – the government organization invested with the job of gathering the correct figures about deaths, accidents and the like – recently claimed that the risk of a Covid death is 32 times higher in the unvaccinated and only 1 percent among the double vaccinated.

In fact, this information was collected and collated starting from the beginning of January 2021 when virtually nobody had been vaccinated.

But when Bryan pored through Public Health England’s examination of the Covid death rate during single months - say August, after a majority of the population had gotten their double shots - he discovered that 70 percent of Covid deaths occurred among the double-vaxxed - slightly different from the 1 percent the ONS had cited. (PHE is the government body that runs the National Health Service.)

Perhaps most insidious was information that arrived on our desk about the two organizations largely responsible for the vaccine and its rollout in the US.  The first appeared in none other than that sober mainstay of the British medical establishment, the British Medical Journal,  after a whistleblower named Brooke Jackson contacted it.

Jackson was a senior clinical researcher from Ventavia Research Group, self-described as the largest privately owned clinical research company in Texas, one of the test centers selected for the Pfizer Covid shot in the autumn of 2020 in the months before it got approval for global release.

Jackson had come there as a trained clinical trial auditor, formerly a director of operations position, and when she started at Ventavia, she had more than 15 years’ experience in research coordination and management.

Offering piles of back up data on the Pfizer trial, Jackson explained to a team of BMJ journalists how data was manipulated, side effects ignored, vaccines mislabeled, the study unblinded (so participants could find out whether they were getting the jab or just a placebo).

When her senior managers ignored concerns of hers about 10 major areas, Jackson reported her worries to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  Hours later, Ventavia fired her – ‘Not a good fit,’ they wrote in their dismissal letter to her.

Jackson responded by handing over evidence and papers to the BMJ, and their journalists followed up by interviewing other Ventavia employees, who backed Jackson’s story.

One described the environment on the Pfizer vaccine trial as ‘helter skelter.’

“I’ve never had to do what they were asking me to do, ever,” one told the BMJ. “It just seemed like something a little different from normal — the things that were allowed and expected.”

And the FDA?  To date, they’ve never followed up on Jackson’s allegations. And Pfizer has re-employed Ventavia for further tests.

Then there is the Centers for Disease Control, the agency entrusted with controlling infectious disease, and their urgings that all pregnant women get the vaccine because it’s safe and protective.

The CDC had claimed that miscarriage rates  among pregnant women who got the shot was about 12 percent – which matches the ordinary rate of miscarriage, said the agency.  So it looked like the vaccine wasn’t increasing the risk to any great extent.

However, when researchers from the University of Auckland ran the CDC data again, they discovered that they’d excluded all but a few women who were in the first trimester of pregnancy, when the risk of miscarriage is highest.

Almost all the women monitored in the trial were in the second and third trimester of pregnancy.  In the second trimester, the risk of miscarriage falls to 1 percent, and in the third trimester, when miscarriage is termed ‘stillbirth,’ the risk of stillbirths falls to 0.3 percent.

After re-examining the data University of Auckland researchers discovered that the true risk of miscarriage from the vaccine was as high as 91 percent – seven times higher than the CDC estimates.

These are not the disclosures of rapid ‘anti-vaxxers.’ The BMJ journalist who wrote the story has been double jabbed.

But the biggest problem with all these questionable facts and truths sloshing around is that we’re now witnessing the rise of something even more sinister, and that is the new guardians purporting to guard against ‘dis-information.’

Many of those questioning government policy have been excoriated for spreading ‘dis-information’; in fact, many of them like naturopath Dr Joseph Mercola have been dubbed as part of the ‘Dis-information Dozen.’

A ‘friend’ of ours recently earnestly wrote us that we would have a bright future as a health magazine if only we would stop spreading ‘mis-information’ about Covid.

Maybe he should have a look at the BMJ or the University of Auckland or the CDC.

There is no such thing as alternative facts or truths.  There is only truth.  And the CDC and Pfizer’s idea of facts and truth is nothing less than criminal.