As many Americans and others around the globe prepare for holiday travel and get-togethers, the omicron variant continues to be a concern. While the available data on transmission, vaccine effectiveness and severity of disease are still preliminary, here’s what we’ve learned so far.
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.
On Nov. 24, South Africa told the World Health Organization that amid a recent increase in COVID-19 cases, it had identified a new variant — later named omicron — with a high number of mutations, raising concerns that it could spread more easily than other variants of the coronavirus. We’ll go through what we know so far about omicron.
Viral social media posts continue to misuse the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System data, and flawed calculations, to claim the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for children is unsafe and will cause many more deaths than it will prevent.
For weeks, President Joe Biden has been saying the Build Back Better plan would be “fully paid for” and would not increase the deficit. But the official congressional scorekeeper in its long-awaited final analysis contradicted the president’s claims.
Both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris lauded the bipartisan infrastructure legislation for creating good-paying jobs for “millions” of Americans. But they meant millions of job-years, not millions of additional jobs.
Aaron Rodgers, the star quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, made headlines when he contracted COVID-19 and then defended his decision not to get vaccinated with a string of false and misleading claims that fact-checkers have frequently debunked.
Raw numbers of hospitalizations or deaths among those who are vaccinated are not a good indicator of whether vaccines are effective. If the large majority of a population is vaccinated, it’s not surprising if most deaths are among the vaccinated. But social media posts misuse data from the U.K. to suggest the COVID-19 vaccines don’t work.
In a speech announcing the framework for a pared-down spending plan, President Joe Biden made some questionable claims.
We spotted a few instances in President Joe Biden’s televised town hall when his answers didn’t square with the facts.