Facts Check

FactCheck.org staffer Catalina Jaramillo was featured on the latest episode of “A Better Life?,” a podcast that explores how COVID-19 has made immigrants’ lives harder. Jaramillo, a bilingual journalist and native of Chile, joined FactCheck.org in January as a writer, copy editor and translator for SciCheck, a project of FactCheck.org. […]

SciCheck Digest The COVID-19 death rate for unvaccinated people has been significantly higher than for vaccinated people in both Israel and the U.S. Despite that, conservative commentator Ben Swann makes the false claim in a video that Israeli data prove vaccines aren’t effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths. But the […]

Aaron Rodgers, the star quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, made headlines when he contracted COVID-19 and then defended his decision not to get vaccinated with a string of false and misleading claims that fact-checkers have frequently debunked. The public learned on Nov. 3 that not only did Rodgers have COVID-19, […]

As with its adult vaccine, Pfizer/BioNTech was the first to cross the finish line and offer a Food and Drug Administration-authorized COVID-19 vaccine to children ages 5 through 11. Here, we describe how it’s different from its grown-up cousin and what experts are saying about who should get it. Quick […]

SciCheck Digest Florida’s total COVID-19 case rate is higher than the national rate and 10th highest in the U.S. But social media posts and the state’s governor point to a recent decline in daily cases as evidence of Florida’s success in handling COVID-19, while ignoring the full impact of the […]

Seeking to deflect the significance of Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s loss in the Virginia governor’s race to Republican Glenn Youngkin, President Joe Biden wrongly claimed that “no governor in Virginia has ever won when … he or she is the same party as the sitting president.” In fact, McAuliffe, himself, was […]

SciCheck Digest More than 70% of Japan’s population has received the COVID-19 vaccines, and the government is moving ahead with a booster shot in December. But a conservative radio host in the U.S. falsely claimed, “Japan drops vax rollout, goes to Ivermectin.” Japan hasn’t stopped its vaccine program and hasn’t […]

Q: Did Dr. Anthony Fauci fund experiments on beagles? A: Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which has provided grants for medical studies using the dogs as test subjects. But the NIAID denied funding one particular project in which sedated beagles had their […]

In a tweet on Oct. 24, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6 as “a terror attack,” which she said resulted in “almost 10 dead.” She called for “any member of Congress who helped plot” it to be “expelled.” Journalist Glenn Greenwald commented on Twitter that […]

SciCheck Digest Raw numbers of hospitalizations or deaths among those who are vaccinated are not a good indicator of whether vaccines are effective. If the large majority of a population is vaccinated, it’s not surprising if most deaths are among the vaccinated. But social media posts misuse data from the […]