An ad from a super PAC supporting Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley features a heart-wrenching testimonial from the father of a woman who was murdered in 2025. The ad falsely implies the accused murderer was one of the prisoners released during the COVID-19 pandemic when Whatley’s Democratic opponent, Roy Cooper, was governor of North Carolina. Cooper had nothing to do with the accused murderer’s release.
In a contentious interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made several false, misleading and baseless claims about the origins of Lyme disease and the respiratory syncytial virus, the COVID-19 pandemic, and what the science shows about autism, vaccination and acetaminophen use during pregnancy.
Heated exchanges between some senators and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during a Sept. 4 hearing amplified confusion about the availability of COVID-19 vaccinations for the fall, with Kennedy misleadingly claiming that “anybody” can still get a vaccine. HHS policies have created roadblocks to vaccine access.
Since regaining power in January, the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed with false certainty that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a lab. But there isn’t clear evidence that the virus came from a lab. A new government website promoting the claim also gets some basic facts wrong.
In recent interviews, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has minimized the risk COVID-19 poses to kids and exaggerated the risk of the vaccine, incorrectly claiming that the shot poses a “profound risk” to children. While serious side effects can occur, they are rare, and have not been shown to outweigh the benefits of the vaccine in protecting against COVID-19.
President Donald Trump this month issued an executive order prohibiting discretionary federal funds from going to schools and colleges or universities that require students to get a COVID-19 vaccine. But there currently are no states that require the vaccines for students, and only a few colleges or universities continue to have such a mandate.
Here, we explain the facts behind several more of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claims during his two Senate hearings as nominee for Health and Human Services secretary.
We wrote about a lot of misinformation in 2024, and, as usual, some fact-checking articles piqued our readers’ interest more than others. In this post, we present the 10 most popular stories published on our website this past year.
In one of his most controversial Cabinet picks, President-elect Donald Trump said he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Here, we summarize our past work fact-checking Kennedy’s claims about health and science.
In his first televised interview since his admittedly “bad” presidential debate, President Joe Biden made a few exaggerated and misleading statements.