Down on the Farm  

As fact-checkers, we see the same or similar claims repeated year after year.

For example, politicians have been distorting the facts about family farms and inheritance taxes for years. (See "Estate Tax Malarkey," circa 2005, or "‘Death Tax’ Talking Point Won’t Die," 2017.)

This week, Deputy Managing Editor Robert Farley returned to that familiar theme when he wrote about a TV ad from a Republican group headed by Marc Short, who was former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff. 

“This ranch has been in our family for four generations, and I want to pass it down to my children, but Joe Biden’s tax increases would make that impossible," Montana rancher Jake Feddes says in the ad.

Feddes goes on to accuse the president of pushing a plan that would "force many family farms and ranches to be sold off to pay his higher capital gains taxes."

There are only two problems with the ad: 

• Biden's plan -- as detailed in a 107-page document from the Treasury Department -- defers such taxes unless or until a farm is sold or no longer operated by the family. So no family would have to sell a family farm to pay the tax.
• Moreover, it is not at all clear that Biden’s proposal is still in play. It was not included in tax legislation advanced by the House.

The scenery in the ad, however, is beautiful. For more about the ad, see "GOP Group’s Ad Spins Biden Tax Plan on Family Farms." 

Reader: Are fetuses used to produce covid vaccinations?

FactCheck.org Director Eugene Kiely: We addressed this question in our story “Texas Doctor Spreads False Claims About COVID-19 Vaccines.” In that story, we debunked Dr. Steven Hotze’s false claim that the mRNA vaccines are “manufactured using cells derived from human babies that were aborted in the 1970s.”

This is what we wrote:

"As we’ve explained before, fetal cells obtained from two aborted pregnancies in the early 1960s, one in Sweden and one in England, were made into cell lines that are used to grow virus to make some vaccines — such as varicella (chickenpox), rubella and hepatitis A. But those cells aren’t present in the vaccines themselves, since the virus is purified before it goes into a syringe.

"The mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, however, aren’t made from a virus and are not manufactured using those fetal cell lines, as Hotze claims. That said, one of the cell lines was used to test those two mRNA vaccines to ensure they worked.

"A third vaccine approved in the U.S. — a single-dose vaccine from Johnson & Johnson that does not use the mRNA platform — is made by using an adenovirus that is produced using a retinal cell line that was first obtained from a fetus in 1985, according to the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Like other vaccines manufactured using the cell lines, fetal cells are not actually present in the J&J COVID-19 vaccine."

Wrapping Up

Here's what else we've got for you this week:

• "Infrastructure Bill Proposes Voluntary Pilot Program for Per-Mile Vehicle Fee, Not ‘Driving Tax'": The Senate-approved $1 trillion infrastructure bill would create a voluntary pilot program aimed at studying per-mile user fees for motor vehicles to fund the Highway Trust Fund. The bill does not include a “driving tax,” as some social media posts misleadingly claim.  
• "Partisan Claims About Flight Cancellations Lack Evidence": Southwest Airlines’ flight cancellations fueled partisan claims over the weekend that transportation workers were protesting COVID-19 vaccine requirements and causing the cancellations. But there’s no evidence that workers staged protests. The Federal Aviation Administration, the airline and labor unions have all cited other reasons.
• "Republicans Mischaracterize Proposed Financial Reporting Requirement": To help detect unreported income and narrow the gap between federal taxes collected and owed, the Biden administration has proposed expanding annual reporting requirements for banks and other financial institutions to include the total amounts of money flowing in and out of all business and personal accounts worth at least $600.
• "Migrants Not Responsible for Latest COVID-19 Surge": Infectious disease experts say low vaccination rates, resistance to protective measures such as wearing a mask and the highly transmissible delta variant are driving the current surge of COVID-19 cases in the U.S.

• "Migrantes no son responsables de la más reciente oleada de COVID-19": Los expertos en enfermedades infecciosas dicen que las bajas tasas de vacunación, la resistencia a medidas de protección tales como usar una mascarilla y la muy infecciosa variante delta son las causas del actual repunte de casos de COVID-19 en Estados Unidos.
• "Los errados comentarios de la estrella de baloncesto Bradley Beal sobre el COVID-19": La estrella de la NBA Bradley Beal hizo comentarios erróneos sobre la efectividad de las vacunas contra el COVID-19, difundidos luego en videoclips. Ninguna vacuna es 100% efectiva, pero los ensayos clínicos y las investigaciones muestran que las vacunas contra el COVID-19 son muy efectivas para prevenir enfermedades, particularmente enfermedades graves, incluso entre aquellos previamente infectados como Beal.