Following the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, social media posts baselessly suggest that he and other world leaders were killed or died because they opposed COVID-19 vaccination in their countries. All the leaders named in the posts, except Moïse, died of natural causes. At least one supported vaccination.
There is no evidence that a door-to-door campaign to encourage vaccinations against COVID-19 means President Joe Biden and Democrats “are coming to your front door to force you to take the vax,” as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted. She also cited a figure for reported deaths after vaccination, which is not the same as deaths caused by vaccination.
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.”
In several recent speeches to members of the military, President Joe Biden has sprinkled in a curious piece of trivia about his wife, Jill, saying he thinks she is the only second lady to visit a war zone. She isn’t.
On Twitter, the House Republican Conference posted an image of rising homicide rates in seven cities with this bit of misleading commentary: “Welcome to President Biden’s America.”
A senior aide to President Joe Biden misleadingly claimed that congressional Republicans “defunded the police” when they voted against the American Rescue Plan Act. House and Senate Republicans didn’t support the legislation, but it wasn’t a vote to cut or eliminate federal funding for law enforcement, as the claim may have led viewers to believe.
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 Experts say the analysis misinterpreted data and was flawed — and it has now been retracted by the journal that published it.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.
There is no evidence to indicate that the spike proteins generated by human cells following vaccination are a toxin or that they circulate in the body and damage tissues, contrary to what a Canadian virus immunologist recently claimed.