Many U.S. athletes have been vaccinated against COVID-19 without any adverse effects. But a conservative outlet has cited a list of supposedly vaccine-injured athletes to claim “there may be something wrong with the vaccine.” There’s no proof that the listed athletes — most of them are actually retired — were harmed by the vaccines.
COVID-19 misinformation, election fraud whoppers and false claims by and about the new administration dominate our annual list of the most egregious falsehoods of the year.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant people, and the World Health Organization says the vaccines are safe for them. Yet online articles cite a Canadian doctor who falsely claims that the vaccines have caused an unusually high number of stillbirths in Canadian hospitals. A hospital representative told us there was “no truth to this claim.”
The COVID-19 vaccines administered in the U.S. are not known to increase the risk of heart attack. But social media posts are misinterpreting an abstract in an American Heart Association journal as proof that the vaccine kills. The publisher later issued an “expression of concern” about the abstract “until a suitable correction can be published.”
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Q: Is Pope Francis dying?
A: There is no credible evidence that he is terminally ill. The viral claim is based on a single news story published Dec. 7 by Newsmax, a conservative news outlet, which attributed the information to an unidentified Vatican source. No other publication has reported it.
President Joe Biden has been saying “wages are up” and rising “faster than inflation.” While weekly paychecks have indeed gotten larger since he became president, they have not kept pace with inflation.
It’s not known yet whether the omicron variant causes more or less severe COVID-19 than the delta variant, although some preliminary indications suggest omicron infections might be milder. A Facebook post nevertheless claims, without evidence, that the “toxicity” of omicron is 5 times higher than delta and that its mortality rate is higher.
In a Dec. 8 town hall meeting, Sen. Ron Johnson may have left a misleading impression in saying “standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to kill the coronavirus.” In the laboratory, some mouthwashes have been shown to block infectivity or suppress SARS-CoV-2, but studies involving people using mouthwash are not conclusive. Researchers are continuing to study the matter.
Scientists are still learning about the omicron variant’s ability to spread or cause severe illness and the effectiveness of the current COVID-19 vaccines in fighting it. But a Facebook post misleadingly claims to list seven “symptoms” of the new variant, then suggests they are caused by the vaccines. The list actually refers to complications of COVID-19. Two of the listed conditions are rare adverse events associated with the vaccines.