People with cancer are particularly vulnerable to severe disease and death from COVID-19. Vaccines provide needed protection. It has not been shown that COVID-19 vaccines cause or accelerate cancer. Nor does a recent paper about a mouse that died of lymphoma “prove” that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine induced “turbo cancer,” contrary to social media claims.
The U.S. is seeing an uptick in COVID-19 cases, so it may be prudent for people to wear masks when out in public and take a few extra precautions. But the government is not planning to implement mask mandates or “lockdowns,” despite claims from the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
A video repeating the claim that COVID-19 vaccines are responsible for the sudden onset of various visible ailments — such as fainting and facial paralysis — is making the rounds, again. But, just like the other, similar posts we’ve addressed, there’s no support for this one, either.
A Swiss study found that after a COVID-19 booster, less than 3% of people briefly had a slightly elevated blood level of a protein that can be a marker of heart injury. No one in the study had any serious heart damage, and other experts say the findings are unlikely to be clinically significant. Viral posts, however, are spinning the results to falsely claim that the study shows the vaccine’s risks are “off the scale.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s battle against vaccines — and against the institutions that promote them — goes back to at least the mid-2000s, as we explain in the first article of this series. But the arrival of COVID-19 gave the environmental attorney fresh grounds to intensify his attacks and a timely platform to gain new followers and revenue.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent anti-vaccine advocate, is running for president as a Democrat. Our SciCheck team has combed through his recent interviews to identify and correct some of his most common health claims in a three-part series. In this first installment, we address several of his talking points about vaccines.
No COVID-19 vaccines were affected by the tornado that damaged Pfizer’s North Carolina warehouse, which doesn’t produce the vaccines. But some misinformation spreaders are claiming vaccines were destroyed.
It remains unknown how the virus that causes COVID-19 originated, but many scientists think a natural spillover is most likely. Online posts have cited unnamed sources to claim that scientists in Wuhan, China, were the first to get sick with COVID-19. But U.S. intelligence says the researchers’ symptoms were non-specific or inconsistent with COVID-19, and the information has no bearing on the origin of the pandemic.
Breast cancer in younger women has been increasing gradually in recent decades. But a social media post misrepresents case number projections for 2022 and 2023 to falsely claim they show a dramatic rise in early-onset breast cancer — and then baselessly ties its faulty comparisons to COVID-19 vaccines.
Numerous studies have found that additional COVID-19 shots are generally associated with extra protection against the coronavirus. Many people on social media, however, have shared a preliminary finding from a Cleveland Clinic study and misrepresented it as proving that getting more doses increases a person’s risk of infection.