At a July 20 Senate hearing, Republican Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, once again had a testy exchange over whether the U.S. funded gain-of-function research in China, with each man accusing the other of “lying.”
A satire site a month ago published a joke about the Biden administration creating “quarantine camps” for the unvaccinated. Now that fabricated story is circulating online, presented as if it’s real.
A businessman’s post on Instagram and Facebook wrongly claims that the U.S. government “changed the definition of pandemic” in 2004, suggesting that COVID-19 would not have qualified under the old definition. There’s no evidence for those claims — and COVID-19 is by all means a pandemic.
Actress and neuroscientist Mayim Bialik has expressed skepticism about vaccines in the past, but she says she and her two teenage children have received the COVID-19 vaccine. A Facebook post says Bialik “refuses to vaccinate,” leaving the false impression that she opposes COVID-19 vaccines.
Social media posts are misrepresenting an old photo from France by suggesting the sea of people in the streets shows “[p]eople are waking up against vaccine tyranny.” The photo actually shows a celebration in Paris after France won the 2018 World Cup.
Livestock and poultry are not being vaccinated against COVID-19. But a meme is spreading the falsehood that those who eat meat from vaccinated animals will get “VAXXED” by consuming the meat. That simply isn’t possible, according to immunologists.
The delta variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 spreads more quickly than the original virus and has been classified as a “variant of concern” by the World Health Organization. It is now the dominant variant in the U.S. But a meme has been circulating on Facebook falsely claiming the delta variant is “fake news.”
A list of the ingredients used in COVID-19 vaccines is publicly available, and the ingredients don’t include microchips. Yet claims advancing conspiracy theories that they do continue to flourish. A recent video purports to show a microchip reader for pets detecting a chip in a vaccinated person’s arm — but the original video was created as a joke.
The COVID-19 vaccines have been shown in trials and real-world application to be safe and effective. But a paper shared widely online claimed that vaccines cause two deaths for every three lives saved. Experts say the analysis misinterpreted data and was flawed — and it has now been retracted by the journal that published it.
Randomized controlled trials — the highest standard of evidence — have found that hydroxychloroquine isn’t beneficial in treating hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Yet social media posts are claiming the drug works, and conservative outlets have touted an unpublished, and much-criticized, observational study as evidence of the drug’s effectiveness.