Category: Science

Claim

There is no evidence that the Covid-19 vaccines saved a single life.

Full Fact – False

Full Fact say:

Research by the UKHSA and Cambridge University suggests that the Covid-19 vaccines saved more than 100,000 lives in England alone.

https://fullfact.org/health/covid-vaccines-saved-many-lives/

Our Rating – True

Justification

There is no evidence that Covid-19 vaccines saved lives, only estimates and modelling suggesting so. The safe and effective vaccines appear from personal observation not to be. Can I prove this? No, but the reverse case is also not provable and is certainly not fact, with testimony and statistical numbers going the wrong way around the world in 2023. As an unvaccinated individual I can attest to the unnecessary mandating of Covid-19 vaccines, because I am still alive and this result is an embarrassment to the establishment.

Let’s start at at the conclusion of the Full Fact fact check:

Research by the UKHSA and Cambridge University suggests that the Covid-19 vaccines saved more than 100,000 lives in England alone.

Breaking this down, we can see that it is research, rather than empirical evidence that is being used to prove the other position as negative.

Secondly Cambridge University “suggests” that the vaccine saved lives, that is also not empirical evidence. Yet Full Fact use this “hearsay” put out by the UK government to “prove” their case. I say their case is no better than the facebook posts.

Full fact go on to write:

Although it is hard to know what would have happened in an alternative world where a specific person wasn’t vaccinated, it is possible to show that the vaccines provided a high level of protection against death from Covid-19—because the risk was so much lower in vaccinated people. 

Breaking this statement down, we can see that Full Fact acknowledge it is hard to know what would have happened in an alternative world. They are of course correct at the level of the world, but we do know by country what the Covid-19 vaccination rates were and how many deaths they had.

They jump around in this statement with regard to the topic of the point being made too. An alternative world is one thing, with billions of people on it. However their argument switches to one, just one, individual straight after. I could be that one alternative individual they talk about! Is that enough proof?

Certainly every individual case at the beginning of the pandemic seemed to be used as propaganda to scare the masses, and the establishment went that route repeatedly, extrapolating from a single case to us all!

Coronavirus: first UK death confirmed as cases surge to 116

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/05/more-than-a-hundred-people-in-uk-infected-with-coronavirus

Now at the back end of the pandemic every “one death” from a vaccine perhaps as shown in the Yellow Card reporting system, is dismissed as coincidence

how can researchers distinguish between a true side effect and an adverse event that occurred due to coincidence and/or bad luck?

Understanding causality in adverse events after vaccination

The last part of the Full Fact statement above uses the term “risk” as a justification for the vaccines being effective. Now i’ve been trained in risk analysis and have risk assessed many situations without any of those risks coming to be, due to the contingency measures I put in place. I know risk is a vague estimate itself, and is again not empirical evidence, rather it is a subjective view of a risk assessor and depends on whether that risk assessor is any good.

For the record, the definition of risk from the Cambridge Dictionary is:

risk

nounUK  /rɪsk/ US  /rɪsk/

the possibility of something bad happening

This statement ends with the risk being so much lower in vaccinated people. Where is the evidence for this? “so much lower” is just opinion and perhaps a political one at that.

The article then moves on to state:

Overall, the vaccines have therefore saved vastly more lives than they have cost.

I don’t think that Full Fact can make this statement based on their assessment of what appears to be guesswork. The figures have been presented by the UK government, and represent an appeal to authority. An authority who are known to have lied about the cabinet’s own conduct during the pandemic and fines were given to a number of them for breaking their own lockdown rules.

https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-boris-johnson-and-rishi-sunak-to-be-fined-for-attending-covid19-breaking-parties/

So the government are hardly in a position of taking the moral high ground, nor are they an infallible authority to cite.

We are also not at the end of the debacle yet, so to weigh up the two positions now seems foolish. There may be many more that die post 2023 because of the pandemic actions taken in prior years. Oh look, I can speculate too!

What follows is a look at what else is presented in the fact check above and a critique of it.

The fact check provides two links to the same government document but to different chapters. This is the COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report – week 5 and can be found here:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1052353/Vaccine_surveillance_report_-_week_5.pdf

This is from 22 February 2022 and these documents ran for many months past this one, and are still being created in 2023, so I don’t know why the latest/last report was not referenced, but anyway the first link is to page 12 for “Effectiveness against mortality”

This link indicates that a VE value for Vaccine Effectiveness is being cited and this is given by the UK government as 95%, two weeks after a third dose of the Covid-19 Vaccine (brand not stated)

VE is a calculated value and is itself an estimate, so again it is not empirical evidence and there are multiple ways of calculating it. Using the WHO document “Evaluation of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness” which is found here:

https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-2019-nCoV-vaccine_effectiveness-measurement-2021.1

It can be seen in section 9.3.6 Final analyses of VE of this document that final “VE” referred to by the UK government is calculated from ratios and modelling is also used to provide a calculated estimate, and not a measured value.

The second link is to page 55 of the government document and covers “Summary of impact on hospitalisations, infections
and mortality”. It is being used to prove that a number of deaths were prevented by vaccination.

“Cambridge Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit suggests that roughly 127,500 deaths were prevented by the Covid vaccination “

However as you can read above, this again is a suggestion and in the document it states:

“Estimates suggest that 127,500 deaths and 24,144,000 infections have been prevented”

So again we are in the world of guesswork, and no empirical evidence has been presented, only probabilities seem to be on the table. Thus this may be prestigious guesswork, but guesswork none the less.

The document suggests that the numbers of deaths in a world where no vaccinations were given cannot be calculated due to the the divergence of the two realities, and the distance one has moved from the other. This is of course vary convenient for the government, isn’t it.

What evidence is there that other populations faired better than highly vaccinated countries?

So staying on familiar territory, the BBC put out an article comparing countries of the world when it came to deaths vs vaccinations:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51235105

Now this is just speculation based on the BBC’s numbers, but I don’t think this is any worse than what Full Fact do, so:

The UK with a population of 67,886,011 as of 2020 had to the date of the article, 177,890 deaths from coronavirus (don’t get me started on how this was measured, that is for another article) and they had 149,397,250 individuals who received some number of Covid vaccinations.

Nigeria, the most populated country in Africa with 206,139,589 individuals, had 3,144 deaths from coronavirus and had 50,619,238 people with some number of coronavirus vaccinations.

So we have a UK death rate of 266.2 vs a Nigeria death rate of 1.6. Now I know these are estimated numbers and the two countries and peoples are very different, but the numbers are scarily different, more different than should be expected for a “human” response to Covid-19 and to the Covid-19 vaccination. There is a correlation that can be made between the numbers of people vaccinated and the number of deaths post vaccination roll out. I’ll leave you to make your own mind up and to go and compare other countries yourself.

What evidence is there that people were harmed by the safe and effective vaccines!

If the vaccine had been effective, then it would have worked with the first shot, it has been accepted by the CEO of Pfizer that it was not as effective as promised. You can compare the effectiveness from these two articles, one from february 2021:

“Pfizer vaccine ‘highly effective’ in reducing coronavirus
transmission, study suggests”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/covid-vaccine-pfizer-israel-transmission-latest-b1805313.html

and this viral video statement by the Director of Pfizer, from January 2022:

“Two doses of the vaccine offers very limited protection, if any,”

It can be seen by the very fact that multiple doses plus boosters have been administered to people and they still are not protected from catching, spreading, or getting ill from coronavirus, that the vaccines do not work as they were advertised.

So with the effectiveness covered, what about safety?

If the vaccine was safe, I believe that post vaccination the excess deaths from causes other than coronavirus would not be at the levels they have been over the last couple of years in the UK. The overall numbers should be coming down, and they are not. 5 year trends show that this explosion of excess deaths only started after vaccinations were rolled out for Covid-19.

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

In a recent article the Telegraph reports:

Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths gripping Britain is only tip of
the iceberg

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/18/silent-crisis-soaring-excess-deaths-gripping-britain-tip-iceberg/

The BBC writes:

Excess deaths in 2022 among worst in 50 years

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-64209221

These deaths are of the “unexpected” and “died suddenly” kind that only started appearing after the administration of multiple doses of the Coronavirus vaccines. Again this is only correlation, and you can make your own mind up as to causation.

Lastly I wanted to mention the veiled accusation in the Full Fact article that the use of the the term shot is not correctly referring to the Covid-19 vaccination. This is used to sow doubt in the mind of the reader that people on facebook are talking about something else. Well let’s look at the history of facebook. People were quickly silenced and then banned for using the correct terms, this was seen by facebook as mis/disinformation. So people got creative and started using alternative terms which they hoped others would understand to be the same thing, e.g. shot, jab, stabby, clot shot, gene therapy, etc. The media too seemed to distance themselves from the term vaccination and used similar terms, so to suggest that these words, used to avoid censorship, mean something else is subterfuge.

For example the Daily Mail reported:

Two prominent Oxford University researchers — renowned in the field of evidence-based medicine — branded one of the systems used to collate adverse side effects from the jabs as being a ‘mess’. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12143935/UK-watchdog-accused-disturbing-obfuscation-Covid-vaccine-deaths.html

Conclusion

The truth of any matter can be found from the available evidence. It can be understood and learned from, and it can be passed on to others. However it will likely never be confirmed or agreed by the vast majority of people who have alternative truths they wish to believe and share.

One must learn to know the signs of truth without it being told, in fact one will likely be forcefully told the opposite case is true so be careful!

Claim

At a media briefing for Geneva-based journalists, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus in his opening remarks on 20 December 2021 said:

“Some countries are using to give boosters to kill children”

USA Today News – False

USA Today News say:

we rate FALSE the claim that a video shows the WHO director general saying vaccine boosters were used to kill children. Users misinterpreted Ghebreyesus’ stutter, in which he initially mispronounced the first consonant of the word children before quickly correcting himself.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/12/12/fact-check-no-who-chief-did-not-say-covid-19-boosters-kill-children/10847005002/

PolitiFact – False

Tedros “got stuck on the first syllable” of children,” the spokesperson said. “It came out sounding like ‘cil/kil.’ He then correctly pronounced the same syllable immediately after, with it coming out audibly as ‘cil-children.’”

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/nov/18/viral-image/world-health-organization-director-general-stutter/

AFP – False

A representative for the WHO told AFP that Tedros stuttered when delivering his remarks.

https://factcheck.afp.com/http%253A%252F%252Fdoc.afp.com%252F9VD49D-1

Reuters – False

While the scene highlighted online is authentic, users have misconstrued his message. A WHO spokesperson told Reuters the sentence was the result of a slip of the tongue.

https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-tedros-children/fact-check-who-chiefs-stutter-while-speaking-about-booster-shots-triggers-conspiracy-idUSL1N2TE0TW

Our Rating – True

Justification

It is demonstrably true that this is what was spoken, and this can be heard in the recording of his brief and in its captions. It cannot be denied that the video camera recorded these words and the quote in the claim is accurate, period.

The official video is here, but it has been trimmed and his remarks cut short so that the offending word is not heard in this version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE6pTrTH4JM

A embedded version which contains the statement and that continues after the official video is pasted below.

Now to get into the nuances of what was said, there needs to be several things looked at; was it a stutter, was there any body language to suggest a mistake had been made, was it a language translation problem, is there any recognition that he made an awful error and attempted to apologise for it.

Was it a stutter?

According to the NIDCD (National Institute On Deafness and other Communication Disorders, a stutter is:

Stuttering is a speech disorder characterized by repetition of sounds, syllables, or words; prolongation of sounds; and interruptions in speech known as blocks. An individual who stutters exactly knows what he or she would like to say but has trouble producing a normal flow of speech. These speech disruptions may be accompanied by struggle behaviors, such as rapid eye blinks or tremors of the lips.

Can any of this be seen/heard in the above video where Tedros talks about the Omircon variant of the Sars-Cov-2 virus spreading, I think not.

The word “kill” is pronounced clearly and there is a sizable gap between it and the next spoken word “children”. This is not characteristic of a stutter where the speaker tries to correct themselves through repetition of the badly spoken word, or knows what they want to say but are unable to get it out. Rather the flow is normal and proceeds without a stutter, stammer or blocker.

In listening to the rest of the brief, and even though English is not his first language, there is only one sign of a stutter in other parts of his recorded speech, this is when he is not able to say the word “participants” (7:52mins) but this conforms to what would be expected when someone has the inability to read from a script and is not a classic stutter of the type “p-p-p-p-p pizza”. Later when he says “kill children” it is not written down either and is part of the natural flow of an off the top of the head speech.

He does struggle to pronounce some words such as “diseases” and “budget” in one case he repeats what seems to be the same pronunciation of the word “prices” as clearly he thought he was saying it wrong, however this also is not a stutter as it is written down in front of him.

This viral mistake appears to be an unfortunate and subconscious slip of the tongue, it is not a stutter of the likes of ‘cil-children.’ as has been reported.

Was there any body language to suggest a monumental mistake had been made?

When the ridiculously offensive statement is made Tedros is not reading from a written script, and he is speaking freely. When he says “kill children” there is no obvious sign in his face or in his body language that he has made a mistake, and a tragic one at that.

The flow of his speech is steady and intentional and he moves on to further statements without any sign that a mistake has been made. It is as if the words were intended and meant, and there is nothing that suggests he realises a mistake has been made.

The word “kill” appears to be a valid part of his sentence as much as the word “boosters” was.

Was it a language translation problem?

So Tedros is from Ethiopia, and according to wikipedia he is from Asmara. The predominant language spoken there appears to be Tigrinya and the word for “children” in Tigrinya is “ቖልዑ”.

ቖልዑ is pronounced as “Colyu” in English according to www.tigrinyatranslate.com so it doesn’t seem like it would be a mix up in two languages where he is using his native pronunciation of the word, rather than the English word.

There is some other word order mistakes in his speech, but this is not the same sort of error that one makes, and instead it is an ordering of words problem.

The transcript in the video also shows the subtitle for “kill children” and someone else has also interpreted his words this way. Whether that is another person or an AI transcription service is unclear.

Is there any recognition that he made an awful error and attempted to apologise for it?

So this mistake would be a bad one to make and if it had been conscious it surely would have garnered an apology to his audience. This statement clearly has offended a great many people after the fact, so in theory would have done so with the live audience at the time.

Had it been a conscious error i’m sure he would have corrected himself and said something like “I’m sorry I didn’t mean to say kill children” However there is nothing forthcoming in the recording, suggesting that this was indeed an unconscious statement as there is no obvious recognition that what he said was incorrect and embarrassing.

So we are left with the suggestion that this was a straight from memory-to-mouth statement, and little thinking about what was being said was going on at the time. This is reinforced by the lack of any correction following the offensive part.

I will not speculate as to why he would be comfortable saying what he did, or why his audience would not immediately interject to check understanding.

So what was it about, and why does the media cover for him?

What was he trying to say? it is possible that the following sentence was intended:

“So, if it’s going to be used, it’s better to focus on those groups who have the risk of severe disease and death, rather than, as we see, some countries are using boosters to vaccinate children, which is not right.”

This statement makes sense and is logical, however how the word vaccinate and kill could be switched is not at all clear. It is also not apparent how he could make that statement and carry on as is nothing wrong had been said.

The mistake clearly plays on people’s fears that the vaccine is not what it has been sold as, and is therefore a very hot potato which has been dropped.

Now why would the media and fact checkers cover for him? I think simply because it is embarrassing to him, to the WHO, and to the media itself. So there is this in built self correction mechanism which kicks in to hide the statement in the official video and in the official transcript of the briefing which can be found here:

https://www.who.int/multi-media/details/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-for-geneva-based-journalists—20-december-2021

So the media has an automatic “ass covering” instinct, rather than to apologise and explain. Sadly it is this behaviour which leads people down rabbit holes and to dark conclusions, so they must accept some responsibility for bad reporting and of covering up a mistake, if they are to have any credibility in the future.

Sorry seems to be the hardest word!

Claim

On the 14th May 2021 Tony Fauci was questioned by senator Richard Burr as to how many people in his institute NIAID had taken a Covid vaccine. He said that about half of them had.

Snopes Rating – No Rating

APNews – No rating

Full Fact – No Rating

Fact Check – No rating

Our Rating – Partially True

Justification

Various media outlets are claiming that he said that 50% of his staff refused the vaccine. Such as infowars: https://banned.video/watch?id=60a2dce8d666fe3137b6f297

In a video of the meeting doctor Fauci said the following:

I’m not 100 percent sure, Senator, but I think it’s probably a little bit more than half, probably around 60 percent.

60% is clearly not half, and 60% is also not a little more than half, so what is he saying and how has it been interpreted.

Doctor Fauci is selling the figures here to the senator and wants him to believe that the majority of staff in the NIAID are compliant, but he doesn’t say why the other staff have not taken the vaccine.

It is wrong of the media to claim that the staff have refused the vaccine as we do not know their circumstances, maybe they have health conditions that make taking the vaccine dangerous, or maybe they are too young/old. But they are running off of his perceived untrustworthy nature.

When doctor Fauci says “a little more than half” one could assume 51% or 52%, but 60% is a leap over and above the value of half, and is better presented as three fifths. If his statement was honest he should have started at 60%, so it appears that he’s upselling the figure and making it higher than it actually is, and this brings into question the first statement’s truth.

Did a little more than half of the staff at the NIAID take a Covid Vaccine? We will not know from this testimony, and the senator should have asked for clarification as the figure given was suspect. It is possible that less than half took a vaccine, as salesmen tend to overestimate and doctor Fauci covers himself by stating “I’m not 100 percent sure”. However for the media to turn this testimony into half of the staff refuse the vaccine is clearly wrong.

Evidence

The testimony video is here: https://youtu.be/2wcpy6iLfLE?t=18

and is uploaded below:

Claim

In late 2020 and early 2021 people started saying that the Covid-19 vaccines skipped standard animal trials before they were tested on humans.

Snopes Rating – No Rating

APNews – False

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-afs:Content:9792931264

Full Fact – No Rating

Fact Check – True

Q&A on Coronavirus Vaccines

Our Rating – Partially True

Justification

There is a known and expected process for the development of a new vaccine to follow, and this includes animal testing before it is given to humans. The University Of Oxford details these steps as follows:

• Reviewing what has been done before.
• Theoretical development or innovation: coming up with a new idea, or a variation on an existing idea.
• Laboratory testing and development. This involves ‘in vitro’ testing using individual cells and ‘in vivo’ testing, often using mice. The vaccine has to pass rigorous safety tests at this stage, and demonstrate that it works in animals.
• Phase I study – an initial trial involving a small group of adult participants (up to 100 people). This is carried out to make sure that the vaccine does not have major safety concerns in humans, and also to work out the most effective dose.
• Phase II study – a trial in a larger group of participants (several hundred people). Phase II trials check that the vaccine works consistently, and look at whether it generates an immune response. Researchers also start looking for potential side effects.
• Phase III study – a trial in a much larger group of people (usually several thousand). Phase III trials gather statistically significant data on the vaccine’s safety and efficacy (how well it works). This means looking at whether the vaccine generates a level of immunity that would prevent disease, and provides evidence that the vaccine can actually reduce the number of cases. It also gives a better chance of identifying rarer side effects not seen in the phase II study.
• Licensing – expert review of all trial data by the UK government (through the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency – MHRA)  At this stage the regulators check that the trials show that the product meets the necessary efficacy and safety levels. They also make sure that, for most people, the product’s advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.
• Phase IV studies – post-marketing surveillance to monitor the effects of the vaccine after it has been used in the population. These may be requested by a regulatory body, or carried out by the pharmaceutical industry.

https://vk.ovg.ox.ac.uk/vk/vaccine-development

Two of the three main vaccines developed for Covid-19 did skip the Laboratory testing phase and instead went straight to Phase 1. This was the Pfizer Biontech vaccine and the Moderna vaccine. They chose to instead run the animal trials in parallel with their Phase 1 human trial, thus removing the rigorous animal testing safeguard.

The other vaccine developer did not skip this phase, this was AstraZeneca.

To date none of the vaccines have been licensed or approved and instead have an emergency use status from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as well as national governments.

Evidence

https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-vaccine-trial-no-animal-testing.html

https://www.ibtimes.com/coronavirus-update-vaccine-skips-important-animal-testing-phase-straight-human-trials-2941208

Claim

On 08/03/2020 as recorded by 60 minutes TV show Doctor Anthony Fauci – The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that masks would not stop the spread of coronavirus.

Snopes Rating – No Rating

Full Fact – No Rating

Fact Check – Outdated

Lead Stories Rating – Partly False

Our Rating – True

Justification

For some reason Lead Stories and Factcheck.org have focused on the age of the comments and the change in advice following the statement. This is used by facebook to report the statements as “old guidance”

The simple fact is that Dr. Fauci stated to the nation as an expert that he did not believe that facemasks would help protect people from the spread of Covid-19 with the following statement:

There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often there are unintended consequences. People keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.

This is a professional view of an expert that cannot be revoked with the passage of time, so the fact check is incorrect in asserting that his view from many years of scientific investigation can be somehow be changed in a month.

As it happens the evidence of the spread of Covid-19 since show that Dr. Fauci was correct, because masks have been introduced in many countries to no avail, and the spread has exponentially grown even with this mitigation in place.

The idea that an expert opinion is so fluid that it is not worth considering is not what the fact checkers want to present here, rather it is the idea that you do as you are told and you are to forget what the advice was a month ago. This is political agenda not a scientific one as all can plainly see.

Evidence

The transcript of the important part of the interview is as follows:

Fauci: Right now in the United States people should not be walking around with masks.

LaPook: You’re sure of it? Because people are listening really closely to this.

Fauci: Right now, people should not be worried. There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often there are unintended consequences. People keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.

LaPook: And can you get some schmutz sort of staying inside there?

Fauci: Of course, but when you think mask you should think of health care providers needing them and people who are ill. The people who when you look at the films of foreign countries and you see 85% of the people wearing masks that’s fine, that’s fine. I’m not against it if you want to do it that’s fine.

The interview video in full:

The important part of the interview for download:

Claim

On 11/09/2020 The CDC published a report on Community and Close Contact Exposures Associated with COVID-19. In this report the CDC showed evidence that wearing masks was not effective at stopping the virus in three quarters of those patients tested for Coronavirus.

This statement was echoed by President Trump on 15th October 2020.

Snopes Rating – Mostly False

Full Fact Rating – None

Fact Check .org – None

Our Rating – True

Justification

Snopes ruling was as follows:

Nearly three-quarters of people interviewed in a non-peer-reviewed study conducted by the CDC said that they had worn a mask or cloth face covering while in public in the weeks leading up to their COVID-19 diagnosis. The report concluded that although people were wearing masks, that does not mean they were wearing them properly, and that “masks cannot be effectively worn while eating and drinking, whereas shopping and numerous other indoor activities do not preclude mask use.”

However, the findings do not suggest that masks and face coverings are ineffective at preventing the spread of COVID-19. Rather, the report argued that although people said that they had worn a mask, that does not necessarily mean they wore it properly. And even if they wore their mask appropriately and followed recommendations, such measures may be insufficient in certain settings.

The data from the CDC clearly shows the wearing a mask alone is not effective at preventing the spread of Covid-19. This is a fact and it cannot be talked away as Snopes tries to by introducing Social distancing as an obfuscation.

The data in the report clearly shows that 70.6 % of case patients and 74.2% of control participants contracted Coronavirus while always wearing a mask.

Any discussion around this is not science and is introducing politics into the report which does not exist. Suggesting that people did not wear their masks “properly” is demeaning and pernicious and shows that fact checkers are not checking facts, rather selling a narrative.

Evidence

The CDC Report online:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6936a5.htm

A PDF copy attached:

Claim

On 28th September 2020 the mayor of London Sadiq Khan faked getting a flu vaccination.

Snopes Rating – None

Full Fact Rating – None

Our Rating – Partially true

Justification

Sadiq Khan tweeted the following along with a photo

We are heading into flu season.

If you or someone you know is entitled to receive a flu jab, remember you can get one for free at your local high street pharmacy or GP surgery.

Booking one is easy. Just visit http://londonflu.co.uk

In the image it can clearly seen that this is a photo opportunity and not a real vaccination being given.

A close up of the original image shows that the needle has it’s cap on it and thus could not be used to give an injection into his arm as is suggested by the tweet. Also it appears that despite his shirt being rolled back it is covering the intended site of the injection.

This is not the first time a politician has posed for a photo of a vaccination being given, there are other examples of this happening from around the world.

The premier of Queensland, Australia, Annastacia Palaszczuk was filmed in a second mock vaccination shot for the press as they missed the first:

The Ontario Minister of Health, Christine Elliott may also have staged a vaccination injection for the press.

It is unlikely that Sadiq Khan is a genuinely faking his vaccination because he is afraid to take one, giving the mayor two vaccination shots could be dangerous to his health so it is also likely that a press piece would not actually give him a second injection, and instead use a dummy needle for the sake of appearances. However this exercise is misleading to the general public, and should not be done to avoid such speculation of what is obviously posed.

Evidence

Twitter:

We are heading into flu season.

If you or someone you know is entitled to receive a flu jab, remember you can get one for free at your local high street pharmacy or GP surgery.

Booking one is easy. Just visit https://t.co/1tKDvcOzi0 pic.twitter.com/eR1tkfIvcB

— Mayor of London (gov.uk/coronavirus) (@MayorofLondon) September 28, 2020

Here is an image of new disposable hypodermic needles showing the safety caps:

Claim

On 21st September 2020 Sir Patrick Vallance said that UK would see 50,000 cases a day by mid-October unless action is taken.

Snopes Rating – None

Full Fact Rating – Partial

https://fullfact.org/health/vallance-growth-rates/

Our Rating – False

Justification

All of the main stream media used Patrick Vallance’s statement incorrectly:

BBC:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/health-54235708

ITV:

https://www.itv.com/news/2020-09-21/coronavirus-restrictions-what-are-the-new-covid-19-measures-for-pubs

Metro:

Scientists warn of ‘50,000 cases a day’ if infections keep rising

MSN:

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/sir-patrick-vallance-uk-could-see-50000-cases-a-day-by-mid-october-unless-action-is-taken/vi-BB19g9Ig

Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/21/uk-could-have-50000-covid-cases-a-day-by-mid-october-says-chief-medical-officer-chris-whitty

Patrick Vallance prefaced all of his comments as speculation that was not a prediction or prophecy, despite it being reported as such.

He said in his statement

At the moment we think that the epidemic is doubling roughly every 7 days. It could be a little bit longer, maybe a little bit shorter, but let’s say roughly every seven days.

If, and that’s quite a big if, but if that continues unabated, and this grows doubling every seven days then what you see of course, let’s say there were 5000 today, it would be 10000 next week, 20000 the week after, 40000 the week after.

And you can see that by mid October, if that continued, you would end up with something like 50000 cases in the middle of October per day.

He then suffixes his statement by stating:

This is not a prediction

Evidence

The link to the video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji2CGVehQNU

His statement is embedded below:

It remains unknown as to why he thought the words of this statement should be spoken, and why it was a good idea to broadcast easily misconstrued information.

Claim

Indian scientists at the following institute and university wrote a paper on the Novel Coronavirus:

• Kusuma School of biological sciences, Indian institute of technology, New Delhi-110016, India
• Acharya Narendra Dev College, University of Delhi, New Delhi-110019, India

They were identified as the following people:

• Prashant Pradhan
• Ashutosh Kumar Pandey
• Akhilesh Mishra
• Parul Gupta
• Praveen Kumar Tripathi
• Manoj Balakrishnan Menon
• James Gomes
• Perumal Vivekanandan
• Bishwajit Kundu

The paper was called “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag” and can be found here on a bioRxiv server:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1.full

They used the following tools to come to a conclusion:

• NCBI viral genome database (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/)
• GISAID (Elbe & Buckland-Merrett, 2017)[https://www.gisaid.org/]
• MUSCLE software (Edgar, 2004)
• MEGAX software (Kumar et al., 2018)
• Multalin software (Corpet, 1988)
• BLASTp and BLASTn
• WISS-MODEL online server (Biasini et al., 2014)
• PyMol (DeLano, 2002)

Their conclusion was that the Novel Coronavirus SARS-COV-2 (2019-nCov) had inserts in it mapped to short segments of amino acids in the HIV-1 virus.

Snopes Rating – False

The Origins and Scientific Failings of the COVID-19 ‘Bioweapon’ Conspiracy Theory

Our Rating – True

Justification

The methodology for the experiment was sound and the despite this being a pre-print of a scientific paper that had not yet been peer reviewed, the only review comments made that caused the paper to be withdrawn were about the language used in the discussion, and there being similarities between HIV-1 inserts and other organisms inserts.

There was no criticism of the method, the collection of the test data or the tools used, and their computer aided results obtained .

Instead the following critisism was made in: “https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/03/retraction-faulty-coronavirus-paper-good-moment-for-science/”

The use of the word “uncanny” in the title, together with “unlikely to be fortuitous”

The author’s methods seemed rushed, and the findings were at most a coincidence

Neither of these reasons by an unknown reviewer are addressing the data or the findings. They simply chastise the authors for some non-scientific terms being used.

Further criticism was made by Arinjay Banerjee in:

No, “HIV insertions” were not identified in the 2019 coronavirus, contrary to claims based on questionable bioinformatics study

The critique in this piece is that the HIV protiens identified were common to other viruses and thus could not be conclusively shown to be HIV.

indeed it has high identity to the HIV gp120/gag. However, the authors chose to align only this small region and not do a basic check on whether there were other sequences which were also homologous (showing high degree of similarity/identity). As it turned out, the region is also homologous to many unrelated sequences. As such, the conclusions drawn from the data are no longer valid

However HIV had not been ruled out either by this thought process, so the comments were a distraction rather than a real objection.

So we have some vague hand wavy excuses for why the paper was invalid. The following things by virtue of not being part of the review are thus considered to be correct and true:

• The correct virus sequences were obtained and were correctly processed
• The correct tools were used to process the sequences to arrive at a computer assisted conclusion
• The tools were used correctly producing output that is consistent with reviewing scientists expectations
• The virus has unnatural inserts that a bat coronavirus wouldn’t normally have
• The amino acid inserts do resemble those found in HIV-1

Evidence

The paper is archived here for reference: