News Corp’s pro-vaccine machine smears grieving mother as “lunatic” before trial

• The New York Post called an Idaho mother a “lunatic” and “deranged” for claiming vaccine injuries killed her twins after she was indicted for murder.
• News Corp operates in a health-advertising market flush with pharma and government vaccine money, but hasn’t disclosed whether — or how much — of that money reaches its own outlets.
• News Corp journalists in Australia bragged about changing vaccine laws via their “No Jab, No Play” campaign, not neutral reporting.
• The Post attacked vaccine safety critics while sister outlets acknowledged vaccine injury is real and victims are failed.
• Andrea Shaw’s case mirrors past collapsed prosecutions like Sally Clark’s, where infant deaths were wrongly treated as murder.

In early July, the New York Post ran a headline that crossed a basic line of fairness. The tabloid called Andrea Shaw, an Idaho mother indicted after the deaths of her 18-month-old twins, a “lunatic mom” who had claimed her children died of “vaccine injuries,” branding her “deranged” in its opening framing. The Associated Press reported the same indictment without the psychiatric smear — simply noting that a mother who said her twins died after vaccination had been charged with murder.

The gap between those two approaches points to something larger than one bad headline: a media conglomerate with financial ties to pharmaceutical advertising that may have every incentive to ridicule anyone who questions vaccine safety.

That conglomerate is News Corp, parent company of the Post, The Sun, The Times and The Australian. Evidence suggests the company hasn’t just covered vaccine policy; it has campaigned for it, while declining to disclose how much pharmaceutical and government vaccine-advertising money flows through its properties.

How News Corp campaigned for the laws it won’t discuss

In Australia, News Corp’s own journalists took credit for changing vaccine law. Former senior editor Claire Harvey said of the Sunday Telegraph‘s “No Jab, No Play” campaign: “We changed the law in every state, territory and the commonwealth to ensure millions more children got lifesaving childhood vaccinations.” That is a masthead claiming credit for law-changing advocacy, not neutral reporting — from a company that tracks ad revenue by segment but won’t itemize how much comes from vaccine makers or government campaigns.

Britain shows a similar pattern, with a twist. The Sun launched its “Jabs Army” during the COVID-19 rollout, mobilizing tens of thousands of volunteers, while The Sun itself later reported that people had been harmed or even killed by the jabs and that the compensation system was inadequate. The Times separately reported that vaccine-injured people felt “silenced, ignored or treated as vaccine deniers.” The Post‘s own editorial page, meanwhile, called an FDA regulatory delay for Moderna’s flu vaccine a “deadly anti-vax call” and pushed for intervention, even as its sister outlets had already acknowledged that vaccine injury is real and that victims are being failed.

Government ad money raises a conflict no one will disclose

The Post reported that HHS paid contractor Fors Marsh $911 million between 2020 and 2023 for a COVID-19 vaccination promotion campaign. The Australian reported federal vaccine-rollout advertising alone hit $89.5 million in one fiscal year. Pfizer’s own funding disclosures list $500,000 to the Ad Council for its COVID-19 campaign, plus hundreds of thousands more to groups running vaccine-confidence programs. Whether any of that money reached News Corp’s pages specifically remains an open question — one the company could answer by releasing an advertiser-level ledger, but hasn’t. The company benefits from that ambiguity; readers don’t.

Britain’s collapsed prosecutions are the warning the Post ignored

Sally Clark was convicted in 1999 of murdering her two infant sons; her conviction was overturned in 2003 after undisclosed bacteriological evidence emerged. Angela Cannings was convicted in 2002 of killing two sons before an appeals court warned against treating repeated infant deaths as automatic proof of guilt — a review that followed identified 258 prior convictions for scrutiny.

Shaw’s case echoes that pattern. Her twins died May 1, 2025, days after a civil complaint alleges they received hepatitis A, influenza and DTaP vaccines, and were rushed to an ER with an alleged diagnosis of “post-immunization reaction.” The cause of death still hadn’t been released publicly more than a year later.

A responsible headline would have noted the dispute, not settled it. Until News Corp discloses who funds its health coverage, its vaccine reporting deserves real scrutiny — especially when it’s quicker to defend a manufacturer than to extend a grieving mother basic fairness.

Sources for this article include:

ChildrensHealthDefense.org

PopularRationalism.SubStack.com

Brownstone.org