The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that there are enough COVID-19 tests for states to begin reopening their economies. While that may be true for select locations, experts say more tests are needed, even if they don’t agree on a particular number. In the past couple of weeks, President Donald […]
Facts Check
The Falsehoods of the ‘Plandemic’ Video
The first installment of a documentary called “Plandemic” stormed through social media this week, promising viewers on its website that the film will “expose the scientific and political elite who run the scam that is our global health system.” The video appeared across platforms, with individual uploads each garnering hundreds […]
CDC Hasn’t ‘Reduced’ COVID-19 Death Toll
Quick Take 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. Full Story The Centers for Disease Control and […]
False Claim Targets Gates Using Epstein Connection
Quick Take 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. Full Story Bill Gates and his philanthropic foundation, which has committed millions to […]
Trump Falsely Claims COVID-19 Death Projection Assumes ‘No Mitigation’
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. Trump’s error came […]
Video: Trump’s Repeated Coronavirus Claims
President Donald Trump has repeatedly misstated the facts at the White House coronavirus briefings. In this video, we feature five examples from our story “An April Filled With Repeats.” Not a “travel ban.” At least four times in April, the president said he had imposed a “travel ban” on China […]
Trump’s Flawed China Travel Conspiracy
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. “You could fly out of Wuhan where the primary problem was … […]
Trump Ad’s Misleading Use of CNN Interview
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. In the one-minute ad, Wolf Blitzer, anchor of CNN’s “The Situation Room,” is heard asking chief medical correspondent Dr. […]
Media Didn’t Misuse Boy’s Photo in Deaths of Three COVID-19 Victims
Quick Take 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. Full Story […]
Kudlow’s Claim About COVID-19 Spread
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.” In just […]