When politicians say that the United States was “energy independent” under former President Donald Trump, some people may get the false impression that the U.S. was 100% self-sufficient. The country still relied on foreign sources of energy, including oil.
Rothschild & Co. has an office in Moscow and has been operating in Russia since the mid-1990s. Yet posts on social media falsely claim that Russia has barred the Rothschild banking family from doing business in the country. The claim is the latest adaptation of an old conspiracy theory about the family.
A Japanese company found that the antiparasitic drug ivermectin showed an “antiviral effect” against the omicron variant in a lab setting. Reuters has corrected a story in which it “misstated” that the drug was effective in a phase 3 clinical trial with human subjects. Some social media users have repeated Reuters’ reporting error but have not repeated the correction.
Climate change and other human-caused factors continue to put many species at risk, according to conservation groups. But a social media post misleadingly claims polar bears, whales and koala populations are “recovered” or increasing. All three species remain critically endangered or vulnerable, the International Union for Conservation of Nature says.
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.
The vast majority of people who have died with COVID-19 had other medical conditions that put them at risk of severe disease, or other conditions caused by COVID-19. But internet posts misinterpret data about those conditions to falsely claim that Italy has reduced its count of COVID-19 deaths. It hasn’t.
The COVID-19 death rate for unvaccinated people has been significantly higher than for vaccinated people in both Israel and the U.S. Despite that, conservative commentator Ben Swann makes the false claim in a video that Israeli data prove vaccines aren’t effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths. But the charts he uses don’t distinguish between vaccinated and unvaccinated patients.
As of 2020, almost 52% of the U.S. population 25 to 34 years old had earned a postsecondary degree — 11th among the 38 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That statistic conflicts with President Joe Biden’s claim about educational attainment in the U.S.
Afghanistan has implemented a COVID-19 vaccination program and, although administration of vaccines has slowed due to internal armed conflicts, the program is still underway. But some prominent conservative purveyors of misinformation in the U.S. have made false claims about vaccination efforts and the impact of the pandemic in Afghanistan.
An Instagram post highlighted a headline about a non-peer-reviewed study from Israel that found that unvaccinated people previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 had greater immunity against the delta variant than never-infected people fully vaccinated with Pfizer/BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine. But the social media post omitted the study’s other finding that one dose of the vaccine enhanced protection for infection survivors.