As the virus that causes COVID-19 has evolved, the vaccines have become less effective in preventing symptomatic infection while remaining highly effective in preventing severe disease and death. This shift has been misrepresented by anti-vaccine influencers who falsely claim that it means the vaccines don’t work and have been ineffective all along.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has announced that in December he will step down from his positions as chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden and as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and its laboratory of immunoregulation. Here are some of the false and misleading claims about Fauci, his work and his public health guidance that we have written about since the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020.
The IRS Criminal Investigation division’s “Adrian Project” educates the public about the IRS through community outreach sessions with high school and college students. Posts on social media are sharing a video from one of the sessions to falsely claim it shows agents in training. The images were posted by a New Jersey university in 2017 and earlier this year.
President Joe Biden and members of his administration have touted the falling gasoline prices, suggesting that the decrease was because of the president’s policies. But U.S. presidents have little control over the price that consumers pay for gasoline. We look at the reasons for the decline in gasoline prices.
Dozens of former President Donald Trump’s supporters gathered outside his Florida home to protest a recent FBI search of the building. The activity triggered a satirical tweet falsely attributed to Trump’s eldest son, purportedly telling supporters to disperse, and saying, “We have many important people coming through the club and need to keep it clean.”
The reconciliation bill passed by Congress will affect prescription drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries. Democrats and Republicans offer opposing views on how it will affect seniors. We’ll explain what the bill would do.
FBI agents searched the home of former President Donald Trump in Florida on Aug. 8 looking for presidential records and classified materials that were improperly removed from the White House. Social media posts claiming the FBI search was politically motivated have been swirling online, despite there being no evidence that President Joe Biden “had his department of justice’s FBI raid” Trump’s home, as one viral post claimed.
The House passed a bill on July 29 that would make it a crime to knowingly “import, sell, manufacture, transfer, or possess a semiautomatic assault weapon.” Social media posts falsely claim “millions of people will become felons overnight” because of the bill. Under the bill, current owners of such firearms would be allowed to keep them.
The Inflation Reduction Act proposes to raise over $700 billion in new revenues over 10 years to be spent on energy, climate change initiatives, health care and deficit reduction. But not all of those revenues come via higher taxes. More than half comes from health care savings and from beefed up IRS tax enforcement.
Monkeypox is a viral disease that spreads through close physical contact with an infected person and large respiratory droplets that don’t travel more than a few feet. A recent meme on social media gets the facts wrong about how the virus spreads, its severity and symptoms.