It’s a common, misleading refrain in anti-vaccine circles: Childhood vaccines may be unsafe because few if any have been tested in placebo-controlled trials before being approved. But that claim misunderstands the vaccine safety testing process and takes advantage of a narrow definition of a placebo, scientists told us.
Our first quarterly update of various economic and social indicators under Trump’s second term as president.
We’re honored to have won the 2026 Webby People’s Voice Award in the category for Websites and Mobile Sites: News & Politics. Thank you to our loyal readers and social media followers who voted for us.
Elon Musk this week amplified an unfounded claim, based on a distortion of vaccine safety monitoring data, that COVID-19 vaccines killed tens of thousands of people in Germany. The vaccines saved millions of lives worldwide during a deadly pandemic, and serious side effects or deaths from vaccination are rare.
An online ad attacks Rep. Seth Moulton, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, for not being sufficiently progressive because of past policy positions. But it also misleadingly claims that Moulton, a critic of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “thanked ICE as they were terrorizing our communities and then killed citizens.”
Following an executive order from the Trump administration that promotes production of glyphosate, some Democrats have claimed that the herbicide causes cancer. The science, however, is nuanced. While there is some evidence linking glyphosate to cancers in lab animals or to the blood cancer non-Hodgkin lymphoma in agricultural workers, the findings have been inconsistent.
Q: I read this on FB. Is it true? The U.S. Treasury just declared the U.S government is insolvent.
A: No. That’s the conclusion of an opinion piece that cited a Treasury report showing the government’s liabilities outweigh its assets. But that’s been the case for decades, and unlike an insolvent business, the government can levy taxes.
In a speech to what he called “the single largest gathering of American farmers that the White House has … ever had,” President Donald Trump distorted the facts on the estate tax, soybean exports and more.
A month after the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran, President Donald Trump addressed the nation in a prime-time speech on April 1, saying the military operation was “getting very close” to completing its mission. Trump repeated some false and questionable claims we’ve written about before.
April 2 is International Fact-Checking Day. To commemorate it, we produced a video of various mentions of our work over the years by politicians of both parties.
