The first installment of a documentary called “Plandemic” stormed through social media this week. But the viral video weaves a grand conspiracy theory by using a host of false and misleading claims about the novel coronavirus pandemic and its origins, vaccines, treatments for COVID-19, and more.
Claims on social media have been spreading the falsehood that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention significantly lowered the COVID-19 death toll. There has been no such reduction. These claims confuse two different measures of the number of deaths.
There’s no evidence that Bill Gates ever visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean, contrary to a viral Facebook post claiming he went there numerous times. The “flight records” cited do not show that.
Dismissing concerns that states are reopening too soon, President Donald Trump incorrectly said that a newly revised model projecting 134,000 COVID-19 deaths by August “assumes no mitigation.” In fact, the model assumes states will keep their existing social distancing measures in place, unless suspensions have already been announced.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly misstated the facts at the White House coronavirus briefings. In this video, we feature five examples from April.
President Donald Trump has twice now advanced the flawed theory that China nefariously continued to allow flights out of Wuhan, the city where the COVID-19 outbreak originated, to Western cities while blocking flights into other cities in China.
A Trump campaign ad misleadingly edits a CNN interview to suggest 2 million people would have died from the novel coronavirus were it not for President Donald Trump’s China travel restrictions.
Social media posts falsely suggest that news outlets are misusing a boy’s image to report the same child died of COVID-19 in three different countries. The posts actually refer to three different young people who died from the novel coronavirus in Portugal, Belgium and the UK.
Despite early warnings about how damaging COVID-19 could be for Americans, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow defended his late February statement that the U.S. had “contained” the virus, saying on May 3 that the novel coronavirus “spread exponentially in ways that virtually no one could have predicted.”
President Donald Trump has claimed Joe Biden wrote him a “letter of apology” regarding the administration’s travel restrictions on China. But there’s no evidence of such a letter, and Biden’s campaign says it “never happened.”