The Biden administration is not planning to ban gas stoves. But comments from a commissioner on the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission about gas stoves being a “hidden hazard” and that “products that can’t be made safe can be banned” provided just enough fuel for some politicians to stoke fear and outrage.
Sports medicine experts say there has been no increase in sudden death or cardiac injury among U.S. athletes since the COVID-19 vaccines became available. Yet anti-vaccine campaigners, comparing unreliable numbers to an unrelated study, have again spread a false narrative about vaccine safety since NFL player Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest.
A judge on Dec. 24 dismissed Kari Lake’s claim that there was no chain of custody for 300,000 mail-in ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona, during the 2022 election, yet posts on social media continue to spread the baseless claim. Every mail-in ballot in the county had a unique barcode and chain of custody documents to ensure security, election officials said.
The Justice Department is reviewing the circumstances surrounding the discovery of classified documents by personal lawyers for President Joe Biden inside his former office. We review what we currently know about the documents, as well as how this situation compares to the FBI’s recovery of highly classified documents at former President Donald Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
President Joe Biden, who recently made his first visit as president to the southern border, and Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who greeted Biden in Texas, offered competing versions of who’s to blame for a spike in illegal immigration. But both twisted some facts to fit their partisan narratives.
There were some factual missteps in several nominating speeches by lawmakers as Rep. Kevin McCarthy repeatedly fell short of the votes needed to become speaker of the House.
Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field and suffered a cardiac arrest moments after taking a hit to his chest during a tackle. While it’s not yet known why his heart stopped, some experts say his condition is most likely due to a heart rhythm problem as a result of that impact. Still, people on social media have baselessly speculated that it was caused by a COVID-19 vaccine.
Before we ring in 2023, we look back at the most popular articles that we posted to our website in 2022.
Several European countries have reported an early spike of group A strep infections, mostly among children, including cases of rare but deadly bacterial infections. There is no evidence the increase is being caused by nasal spray flu vaccines, as social media posts baselessly suggest. Flu vaccination may even indirectly prevent strep A.
A vaccine safety surveillance study from the Food and Drug Administration has been misrepresented online. The paper did not establish a link between the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine and blood clots, as some have claimed — and to date, other, more robust research has not identified such associations.