Publicaciones en Facebook ofrecen a hispanos borrar sus deudas con un supuesto programa para luchar “contra la recesión”, pero este programa no es real, ni tampoco los videos que lo promueven.
“A todos los hispanoamericanos se les borraran sus deudas hasta este sábado 6 de abril he aquí… porque quieren luchar contra la recesión que se avecina”, dice el video en Facebook del 1 de abril. “Así que es mejor que presente la solicitud mientras todavía ofrecen esto al público”.
La publicación muestra a la presentadora de Univision, Karina Banda, supuestamente dando la noticia del programa de deudas. Pero el video alteró la voz de Banda. El video también presenta imágenes de personas con billetes, tarjetas de crédito y gente celebrando.
Lo que promociona el video suena práctico e interesante, pero el video fue editado y ofrece información falsa.
La publicación fue marcada como parte del esfuerzo de Meta para combatir las noticias falsas y la desinformación en su plataforma. (Lea más sobre nuestra colaboración con Meta, propietaria de Facebook e Instagram).
PolitiFact no encontró ningún anuncio oficial del gobierno federal de Estados Unidos, ni artículos de medios verídicos que hablaran de tal programa de alivio de deudas.
Hicimos una búsqueda de imagen inversa y encontramos el video original de Banda en la página de Instagram del programa de Univision Desiguales. En ese video ella tiene el mismo vestido y se ve el mismo fondo que en el video en Facebook, pero ella no habló sobre cómo borrar deudas, sino de los temas de opinión que iban a discutir en su programa el 7 de marzo.
También notamos que los movimientos de labios de Banda en el video en Facebook no coinciden con lo que ella supuestamente dice.
Aunque Banda trabaja en Univision, la publicación en Facebook usa imágenes falsas de CNN para decir que esa cadena de televisión reportó sobre el alivio de deudas. PolitiFact hizo una búsqueda de imagen inversa de la imágenes de CNN en la cual una mujer supuestamente hablaba sobre el programa de deudas para hispanos y no encontramos nada sobre el tema.
No es la primera vez que verificamos publicaciones que prometen saldar la deuda a los hispanos en los Estados Unidos. Otros videos que hemos verificado repiten la afirmación pero con fechas diferentes.
Otras publicaciones en Facebook — que desmentimos en el pasado — mostraban al presentador de Univision Jorge Ramos, supuestamente diciendo lo mismo sobre el alivio de deudas. Pero el video de Ramos también fue editado y mezclaba una parte de un noticiero real con rótulos falsos y una voz manipulada.
(Captura de pantalla de la publicación en Facebook).
Las publicaciones urgían a los usuarios a aplicar al programa de borrar deudas, ya que supuestamente estaba disponible por poco tiempo, pero expertos han advertido sobre este tipo de tácticas engañosas.
“Nunca hay ninguna emergencia en internet que no pueda esperar un día”, dijo previamente Melissa deCardi Hladek, una profesora asistente en el Johns Hopkins School of Nursing.
Existen compañías privadas que asisten con el alivio de deudas, pero es ilegal que te cobren antes de ayudarte, y no pueden garantizar eliminar tus deudas, según la Comisión Federal de Comercio (FTC, por sus siglas en inglés).
Nuestro veredicto
Una publicación en Facebook dice, “A todos los hispanoamericanos se les borraran sus deudas…porque quieren luchar contra la recesión que se avecina”.
PolitiFact no encontró programas oficiales del gobierno federal que ofrezcan tal servicio a hispanos en Estados Unidos.
La voz de Banda fue alterada para aparentar que ella habló sobre este supuesto programa; sus movimientos de labios no concuerdan con lo que decía el video.
Calificamos esta declaración como Falsa.
Marta Campabadal Graus, reportera de PolitiFact, contribuyó a este reportaje.
Lee más reportes de PolitiFact en Español aquí.
Debido a limitaciones técnicas, partes de nuestra página web aparecen en inglés. Estamos trabajando en mejorar la presentación.
As people around the country await the April 8 total eclipse, conspiracy theories about a Switzerland-based nuclear research facility have some social media users on edge. In their view is CERN, also known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
“Why is CERN being reactivated on April 8, the same day as the infamous eclipse?” asked a March 29 Facebook post, referencing what it called the group’s plan to activate “the large hadron collider” on the day of the eclipse. “My gut instinct is that something really big is being planned for that day… perhaps a total takedown of both the grid and society in general worldwide.” In another post April 1, a man in a baseball cap speculated that CERN is deliberately starting back up April 8 to “open up a gateway, a portal.”
(Screenshot from Facebook)
These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
It is not unusual for scientists to conduct research during an eclipse, when the sun’s corona becomes visible and areas in totality go briefly dark in the moon’s shadow. Total solar eclipses allow researchers “to study Earth’s atmosphere under uncommon conditions.” NASA, for example, is launching three sounding rockets on the day of the eclipse to study its effects on the ionosphere (a mission that also became a subject of misinformation).
But CERN’s research is different. The primary research focus of CERN — an acronym derived from the French name “Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire” — is particle physics, or “the study of the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces acting between them.” The organization seeks to find answers about the universe’s fundamental structure.
CERN houses the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, which measures around 16.8 miles (27 kilometers) in circumference. The collider’s aim, as Britannica explains, is to “understand the fundamental structure of matter by re-creating the extreme conditions that occurred in the first few moments of the universe according to the big-bang model.”
CERN spokesperson Sophie Tesauri told PolitiFact in an email that the collider’s activities have nothing to do with the April 8 eclipse.
“What we do at CERN is doing particle physics with accelerators such as the LHC, and this has little to do with astrophysics in a direct way,” Tesauri said. “So there is no link between the solar eclipse on Monday 8th April, and what we do at CERN.”
CERN has an accelerator complex composed of machines with “increasingly higher energies.” A beam of particles is injected by one machine to the next one, bringing the beam to a higher energy — and the Large Hadron Collider is the last element in this complex.
“Hadrons” are a group of particles that include protons and ions. In the Large Hadron Collider, two beams travel in opposite directions at nearly light speed and are made to collide. In 2012, Large Hadron Collider experiments led to the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, a particle named for British physicist Peter Higgs, who in the 1960s postulated about the existence of a particle that interacted with other particles at the beginning of time to provide them with their mass.
Tesauri told PolitiFact that the accelerator complex is restarted every year after a brief winter technical stop, when beam production ceases so that the accelerators can undergo maintenance. Restarting an accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider “requires a full commissioning process in order to check that all equipment works properly.”
“Now that all the checks have been performed, the LHC is ready to provide particle collisions to the LHC experiments, and first collisions for this year should actually happen today 5th April,” Tesauri said in her email. “This will mark the beginning of the physics run for 2024.”
The beams were initially expected to enter collision April 8, according to a March 14 report. It said, “Depending on how work progresses, this milestone may shift forwards or backwards by a few days.”
On April 5, CERN announced that the Large Hadron Collider achieved its first stable beams in 2024, “marking the official start of the 2024 physics data-taking season.” The statement said that from March 8 to April 5, the Large Hadron Collider was set up to handle the beam and tested for any issues.
“Although the solar eclipse on 8 April will not affect the beams in the LHC, the gravitational pull of the moon, like the tides, changes the shape of the LHC because the machine is so big,” CERN’s announcement said. This phenomenon is not unique to an eclipse; a 2012 news release discussed distortions in the machine brought about by a full moon.
According to CERN’s frequently asked questions page, the Large Hadron Collider is expected to run over 20 years, “with several stops scheduled for upgrades and maintenance work.”
Conspiracy theories surrounding CERN’s work have been circulating for years. In a statement to Verify fact-checkers, CERN said that its research “captures the imagination of lots of people, which is why CERN has been featured in a lot of science fiction books / even movies, around the world.” CERN said works inspired by its research are fictional and “should not be confused with the actual scientific research.”
False claims about the group’s work are so common that the organization addresses some common theories on its FAQ page: No, it won’t “open a door to another dimension,” and no, it won’t “generate black holes in the cosmological sense.”
We rate the claim that CERN is activating its Large Hadron Collider in connection with the April 8 solar eclipse False.
Was former President Donald Trump prosecuted for something that is ordinarily not considered unlawful? That’s what a viral Facebook post says.
“When Trump takes out a loan and pays it back with interest, it is a crime,” the March 26 post claimed. The post is then critical of President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, parts of which have been blocked by the Supreme Court.
The Facebook post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
The post appears to be referring to the New York attorney general’s fraud case, which accused the former president of manipulating the value of properties to obtain favorable loan terms from banks.
That was a civil case, not a criminal matter. He was not accused of taking a loan out and paying it back with interest.
In February, New York judge Arthur Engoron ruled in the state’s favor, saying that “in order to borrow more and at lower rates, defendants submitted blatantly false financial data to the accountants, resulting in fraudulent financial statements.”
Engoron ordered Trump to pay more than $450 million and barred him from being an executive for any New York businesses for three years. His sons and other co-defendants were also barred from executive roles.
Trump has appealed the ruling and he posted a $175 million bond, which will prevent his assets from being seized while the case is under appeal.
We rate the claim that Trump was sued for taking a loan and paying it back False.
Fairshake, its website says, is a super PAC that “supports candidates committed to securing the United States as the home to innovators building the next generation of the internet.” It generally supports politicians who back policies favorable to the cryptocurrency industry.
The group registered with the Federal Election Commission in 2023, and it is financially supported by some of the most influential companies and executives in the digital currency sector. As a super PAC, it can receive unlimited financial contributions from donors, who must be disclosed in periodical reports to the FEC.
In December, Fairshake, along with two affiliated super PACs, Defend American Jobs and Protect Progress, announced that they had raised a combined $78 million. Through Feb. 29, Fairshake’s total alone had grown to about $92 million, according to its FEC filings. Meanwhile, Defend American Jobs and Protect Progress had collected about $10 million each, including $5 million transfers from Fairshake.
Among the largest contributors to all three super PACs are Coinbase, a company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange; Ripple Labs, which specializes in a blockchain technology used to make digital payments; and AH Capital Management, also known as Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the co-founders of AH Capital Management, are two of the biggest individual donors to the groups.
During the 2024 primary season, Fairshake has mostly been involved in the race for the open U.S. Senate seat in California, where the group spent more than $10 million on independent expenditures opposing Rep. Katie Porter, who was one of several Democrats running to fill the position. The super PAC reportedly saw Porter, who failed to advance to this fall’s general election, as a potential ally of Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a critic of cryptocurrency platforms.
The New York Times reported in March that a spokesman for Fairshake, Josh Vlasto, said the super PAC plans to be active in other U.S. Senate races – specifically, the Democratic primaries in Maryland and Michigan, and the general elections in Ohio and Montana.
The group also has spent almost $1.3 million on ads and other communications supporting a bipartisan group of candidates for House races, including Republican Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota and Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey.
As for Protect Progress, it has spent over $2.7 million on independent expenditures supporting Democratic House candidates. Meanwhile, Defend American Jobs has spent almost $7.3 million supporting a mix of Republican House and Senate candidates.
Say goodbye to the mixtape, say hello to the misinformation compilation starring podcaster Joe Rogan.
Or not.
In a March 29 Facebook video, what sounds like Rogan’s voice floats conspiracy theories about sea monsters, gold mines and aliens.
“Did you know about the NASA theory, let me explain,” the Rogan-like voice says as the video rolls images and illustrations showing space and underwater scenes. The claims that follow include that NASA “prohibited” ocean exploration, the Loch Ness Monster could be real, “the Grand Canyon is hiding the legendary lost city of El Dorado,” and the Bermuda triangle may be “housing supernatural forces as well as alien abductions.”
(Screenshot of Facebook post)
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
This isn’t Rogan. It’s one of the latest of many artificial intelligence-generated Rogan clips circulating on social media. Searching TikTok for “Joe Rogan” and the Bermuda triangle, the Grand Canyon, or NASA sea exploration, returns dozens of similar seemingly AI-generated clips.
Hany Farid, a University of California, Berkeley professor who specializes in digital forensics said there were “several tell-tale signs that this video is fake.”
One, Rogan appears only briefly in the video, and when he does, his mouth movements don’t sync with the audio. Secondly, the addition of background music, “is a classic technique to confuse models designed to detect AI-generated voices.” And, finally, an analysis of the audio, isolated from the music, “confidently classifies the audio as AI-generated.”
After several searches on Google, YouTube, and TikTok, we could find no evidence these were real audio clips or things Rogan had said on his podcast, the “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
That’s not to say Rogan has not sometimes discussed similar topics on his show. In 2020, he interviewed former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman about his weeks living on the ocean floor. In 2019, he discussed Egyptian artifacts that were supposedly found in the Grand Canyon — a myth the Smithsonian Institution has debunked.
But we found no authentic audio clips matching the viral Facebook video.
We rate the claim that this video shows Rogan talking about “mythical sea beasts,” gold in the Grand Canyon and aliens in the Bermuda triangle False.
Small amounts of aluminum have been used for many decades to strengthen the immune response to vaccines. Exposure to high levels of aluminum has been associated with brain and bone problems, but there is no evidence that the level of exposure provided by vaccines leads to such toxicity, contrary to social media claims.
What ingredients are in vaccines?
What ingredients are in vaccines?
All vaccines contain an active ingredient, or antigen, and tiny amounts of other substances that allow them to work, stay free of contamination and remain effective for longer.
The antigen is a substance that prompts the body to mount an immune response, including protective antibodies. Antigens can be viruses, bacteria, parts of those or even the genetic code to produce parts of them. All viruses, bacteria or toxins used in vaccines are either inactivated or weakened so that they can’t make people sick. Manufacturers list the components of each vaccine on publicly available package inserts and anyone can check for possible allergens.
Some vaccines may also contain adjuvants, preservatives, stabilizers and residual byproducts from the manufacturing process. All of these components are safe in the concentrations used in vaccines. Many of them are common and can be found in our bodies, drinking water, food or other products we ingest or use regularly.
Adjuvants are substances that help vaccines work better by boosting the body’s immune response. Tiny amounts of aluminum salts, for example, have been safely used for this purpose for decades.
Preservatives are typically added to multidose vaccine vials to prevent contamination once a vial is opened. Although anti-vaccine groups falsely claim the tiny amounts of thimerosal, a preservative that contains ethylmercury, in vaccines is dangerous, it has been shown not to be harmful. Ethylmercury is not the same as methylmercury, a kind of mercury found in some fish and animals that can be toxic at high levels. Ethylmercury is safer because it’s broken down and excreted faster from the body. There is no link between thimerosal in vaccines and autism. Since 2001, thimerosal has not been used in any childhood vaccines in the U.S. other than multidose flu shots.
Stabilizers are used to keep the antigen stable during shipping and storage. These can include sugars, amino acids, proteins and gelatin.
Vaccines may also contain surfactants or emulsifiers used to keep all the ingredients blended together and prevent clumping. Anti-vaccine groups sometimes focus on an emulsifier called polysorbate 80 to spread fear. But the compound, which is safely used in vaccines, is found in much higher concentrations in many foods, including ice cream.
Trace amounts of other substances from the manufacturing process sometimes remain in vaccines. For example, many vaccines are made by growing viruses or producing proteins in chicken eggs or cell lines, so vaccines may contain DNA or proteins from those cells or other products from the growth media. Similarly, inactivated vaccines may contain formaldehyde, which is used to kill viruses. Again, the amounts of these substances in vaccines are minuscule and harmless, since the antigens are purified before being put into vials. No vaccine contains fetal cells or tissue.
No vaccines contain antifreeze, despite claims to the contrary. The confusion often stems from the fact that antifreeze contains ethylene glycol, and some vaccines contain polyethylene glycol. While the names are similar, the compounds are very different. The one in vaccines is nontoxic and found in a variety of skin products and medicines.
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Adjuvants in vaccines — ingredients added to increase efficacy — help spur the immune system to mount a strong response to the vaccines’ main ingredients. Aluminum serves as an adjuvant in some vaccines, such as those against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, and hepatitis A and B.
Aluminum is found in the Earth’s crust, water and the air, as well as in a variety of foods, drugs and other products. Animal and human studies indicate that high doses of aluminum can have neurological effects. People with impaired kidneys who are exposed to too much aluminum over time via dialysis or nutrition delivered directly into their bloodstream have developed problems with their brains and bones.
However, exposure to the small amounts of aluminum in vaccines poses an “extremely low risk to infants,” according to calculations by scientists from the Food and Drug Administration.
Nevertheless, social media posts regularly raise unfounded concerns about aluminum in vaccines, including that it can harm the nervous system, that it exceeds safe levels or it is unsafe because it never leaves the body. As we have written, this is part of a larger pattern in which people attempt to raise concerns about vaccines by making unfounded claims of harms from substances present in tiny amounts.
“Aluminum is a known neurotoxin,” said one recent post on Instagram. “If we keep bombarding the system over and over at so many well visits with an increasing scheduling there has to be a breaking point,” the post misleadingly said, referring to aluminum exposures from vaccines.
The post went on to refer to an FDA “safety limit” of 5 micrograms aluminum per kilogram body weight per day, juxtaposing it with amounts of aluminum in vaccines. But FDA draft guidance recommends this as the limit for total daily aluminum exposure via nutrition products infused intravenously, given to people who cannot absorb nutrients through their guts. This limit does not apply to vaccines, which have their own aluminum limits.
“There are conditions where aluminum can harm the nervous system,” Robert Yokel, an emeritus professor at the University of Kentucky who has studied the toxicology of aluminum, told FactCheck.org in an email. He referenced the example of dialysis patients who were exposed to high levels of aluminum infused directly into their blood.
However, “it is the dose (concentration) that is relevant,” Yokel said, adding that he is not aware of evidence that typical exposures to aluminum harm the brain.
Known Side Effects of Aluminum Adjuvants Are Typically Minor
Aluminum adjuvants in vaccines can cause side effects at the injection site. These local reactions include “some redness, swelling, and a little bit of firmness,” Dr. Neal Halsey, director emeritus of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins University, told FactCheck.org, but these don’t lead to long-lasting problems.
Photo by Mathurin NAPOLY/matnapo via Unsplash.
Halsey said that in very rare cases, people can develop a hypersensitivity to the aluminum adjuvants after receiving multiple vaccine doses, leading to nodules at the injection site. This reaction occurs at an estimated rate of 300 to 8,300 per million people.
A recurrent misleading social media claim is that aluminum accumulates in the body and this means it’s unsafe. While most aluminum — whether from vaccines or other sources — is processed in the kidneys and excreted in urine, some does remain in the body. Of the aluminum that stays in the body, the majority is found in the bones.
“Over the human lifespan the aluminum concentration has been shown to increase in several organs, including the brain,” Yokel said.
However, he said, aluminum accumulation is not necessarily unsafe. “This is an example of the ‘dose making the poison,’” he said. “To conclude that aluminum accumulation results in an unsafe condition, without consideration of the level of accumulation, is a non-sequitur fallacy.”
To get a better sense of the possible impact of aluminum from vaccines on infants, researchers from the FDA in 2011 published an updated analysis of the amounts of aluminum infants would be exposed to via vaccine and dietary sources, including breast milk, formula and food.
As their benchmark, the researchers used a minimal risk level for aluminum established by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry based on experiments in which mice were fed an aluminum salt. The studies measured neurological impacts on mice exposed to aluminum in utero and during early life. The minimal risk level is an estimate of how much of a substance a person can consume “without a detectable risk to health,” according to the agency.
Aluminum-containing vaccines are generally injected into the muscle, and the aluminum is released gradually into the bloodstream from the injection site over time. Taking into account the multiple possible sources of aluminum in the babies’ blood and the slow release from the vaccines, the body burden of aluminum would not be expected to rise above the safe limit, the researchers found. In fact, the level stayed at less than half the safe limit, they wrote, pointing out that this limit itself has a cushion built in and that exposure at or slightly above the limit might be safe.
“We conclude that episodic exposures to vaccines that contain aluminum adjuvant continue to be extremely low risk to infants and that the benefits of using vaccines containing aluminum adjuvant outweigh any theoretical concerns,” the FDA researchers wrote.
The researchers found that during infancy, the aluminum from vaccines at most might contribute twice the amount that the body absorbs from dietary sources, taking into account that the vast majority of aluminum in food or drinks is never absorbed into the body. Other research has indicated that overall, vaccines contribute a negligible amount of aluminum to children’s total exposure.
One study, published in 2017 in Academic Pediatrics, took blood and hair samples from 85 healthy children between 9 and 13 months of age. The researchers did not find a correlation between the vaccines the children had received and the amount of aluminum in their hair or blood, either when looking at total vaccine history or the vaccines they’d gotten the day of testing. This is in keeping with results of a smaller study of 2-month-old preterm infants, which also didn’t find a relationship between vaccination and blood aluminum levels.
Posts Misrepresent Aluminum Safety Limits
As we’ve discussed, there are FDA limits on the amount of aluminum that can be in individual vaccines. Despite this, social media posts repeat claims that aluminum in vaccines exceeds safe limits.
“If the baby’s typical size, and let’s say he or she weighs about 8 pounds, the amount of aluminum in the hepatitis B vaccine alone is almost 14 times the amount of aluminum that’s FDA approved,” Ty Bollinger misleadingly said in a video clip shared in a recent Instagram post. Bollinger, who owns a publishing company, has long been a prolific spreader of misinformation on topics such as cancer and vaccines.
The video refers to a limit of 5 micrograms of aluminum per kilogram body weight. But as we’ve said, this draft recommendation applies to total daily exposure from intravenous nutrition products. FDA regulations have also long stated that these intravenous nutrition products must carry a warning label stating that people with impaired kidney function, including premature babies, “accumulate aluminum at levels associated with central nervous system and bone toxicity” when exposed to levels greater than 4 to 5 micrograms per kilogram per day.
This recommended daily limit does not apply to vaccines, however. No available vaccines in the U.S. are given intravenously. Vaccines using aluminum adjuvants are generally injected in the muscle.
With intravenous nutrition, “100% is delivered into the blood immediately, from which it can distribute throughout the body and be eliminated (by the kidneys, which account for >95% of aluminum elimination),” Yokel explained.
By contrast, absorption of aluminum from vaccines “is not immediate,” he said. The same amount of aluminum given in a vaccine would not produce as high of a blood concentration as the same amount given intravenously, he said, and the aluminum would be eliminated over time as it was “absorbed from the non-intravenous administration site.”
“Bottom line: Any time after the administration by the non-intravenous routes the blood level of aluminum would be less than after the intravenous route,” Yokel said.
Studies of Aluminum Adjuvants Are Ongoing
Online posts and articles also misleadingly imply that there aren’t studies into the safety of aluminum in vaccines. As we’ve said, people have studied the safety of aluminum in vaccines in the past and continue to do so.
One recent post included a screenshot of an Informed Consent Action Network webpage that says, “CDC and NIH unable to provide a single study to support the safety of injecting aluminum adjuvants despite its widespread use in childhood vaccines.” ICAN — a nonprofit founded by Del Bigtree, who has a history of spreading incorrect information about vaccines — describes making Freedom of Information Act requests to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health for “any human or animal studies” that the agencies relied on to “establish the safety of injecting infants and children” with aluminum adjuvants.
It is true that the agencies did not send studies back in response to specific FOIA requests, but this does not mean aluminum adjuvants have not been studied.
According to documents on the ICAN website, the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office ultimately responded that “[t]his request is outside of ISO purview and should be referred to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.” The NIH told ICAN to search publicly available materials, such as the scientific literature.
The FDA assesses the safety of vaccines on a case-by-case basis. This includes evaluating whether the included adjuvants adversely affect the safety of the vaccine.
Outside of the FDA approval process, there also have been attempts to evaluate various safety concerns related to aluminum adjuvants. One 2004 study, published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases, responded to concerns about aluminum-containing versions of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, or DTP, vaccines by pooling data from studies in children that compared DTP vaccines with and without aluminum adjuvants.
“The results of our review should be interpreted within the limited quantity and quality of available evidence,” the researchers said. “Within these limits, we found no evidence that aluminum salts cause any serious or long-lasting adverse events.”
Another concern was that aluminum in vaccines might cause a family of autoimmune disorders, but this has not been borne out. The evidence doesn’t support the notion that these conditions are caused by aluminum adjuvants, according to a 2017 review article published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice.
For instance, the researchers said, one large study found that people who received allergy shots containing a very high cumulative dose of aluminum — used outside the U.S. — had a lower rate of autoimmune disease than those who received other allergy treatments.
Most recently, a study published in 2022 in Academic Pediatrics found a “potential safety signal” indicating an association between aluminum-containing vaccines and asthma. The study relied on medical records from Vaccine Safety Datalink, a vaccine safety monitoring collaboration between the CDC and health care organizations.
The researchers chose to study asthma because of animal data indicating a theoretical immunological mechanism by which aluminum-containing vaccines could increase asthma risk while also decreasing the risk of autoimmune diseases, such as Type 1 diabetes. Interestingly, a separate VSD study, published in 2021 in Pediatrics, found that increased aluminum exposure via vaccines was associated with a reduced risk of Type 1 diabetes.
Sometimes potential safety signals turn out to be real, and sometimes they do not. The question of whether aluminum-containing vaccines are linked to asthma “is now undergoing further evaluation and more studies to try to determine if it’s really true or whether it’s just an association,” meaning there is no cause-and-effect relationship, Halsey said.
Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.
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“Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD).” CDC website. Updated 2 Aug 2023.
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Wisconsin is used to tight elections. Razor-thin presidential races. Statewide cliffhangers.
But when Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Brian Schimming claimed in a media call during Vice President Kamala Harris’ March 6 visit that “We’ve had 12 elections in 24 years in Wisconsin that have been decided by less than 30,000 votes,” it struck us as a lot.
So, we decided to dig into the numbers.
Close calls for a handful of statewide races
When PolitiFact Wisconsin contacted state GOP spokesman Matt Fisher to determine which races Schimming was referring to, he supplied a list of 12. PolitiFact confirmed the results from those races with the Wisconsin Elections Commission election results archive and added the vote margin.
This is how the races played out in the last 24 years:
2000 presidential – Republican candidate George W. Bush narrowly defeated Vice President Al Gore by 5,708 votes.
2004 presidential – Bush won again, beating out Democratic ticket of then-U.S. Sen. John Kerry by 11,384 votes.
2006 attorney general – Republican J.B. Van Hollen defeated then-Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk by 8,859 votes.
2008 Wisconsin Supreme Court – Conservative Michael J. Gableman secured victory against incumbent Justice Louis Butler with a 22,303 vote margin.
2011 Wisconsin Supreme Court – The incumbent justice, conservative David Prosser Jr., won a second 10-year term after defeating assistant Wisconsin Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg by 7,004 votes.
2016 presidential – Republican Donald Trump beat out former secretary of state and first lady of the United States Hillary Clinton by 22,784 votes.
2018 gubernatorial – Incumbent Republican Gov. Scott Walker lost his run for a third term after being defeated by Democratic challenger and then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers. Evers won with a 29,227 vote margin.
2018 attorney general race – Current Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, defeated Republican incumbent Brad Schimel by 17,190 votes.
2019 Wisconsin Supreme Court – Former Appeals Judge Brian Hagedorn defeated then-Appeals Chief Judge Lisa Neubauer with a 5,981 vote gap.
2020 presidential – The race saw current President and then-former Vice President Joe Biden beat incumbent Republican President, Donald Trump by 20,608 votes.
2022 U.S. Senate – Incumbent Republican Sen. Ron Johnson won his re-election to a third term after defeating Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes by 26,718 votes.
2022 secretary of state – Incumbent Democrat Doug La Follette narrowly beat out Republican state legislator Amy Loudenbeck. He won a 12th term in office with a 7,442 vote margin.
It’s worth noting that only two presidential contests in the last 24 years did not have close calls: 2008 and 2012. In those two election years, former President Barack Obama won by 414,818 and 213,019 votes, respectively.
Our ruling
On a March 6 GOP press call, Wisconsin GOP Chair Brian Schimming claimed, “We’ve had 12 elections in 24 years in Wisconsin that have been decided by less than 30,000 votes.”
And he was not wrong, with Wisconsin Elections Commissions data confirming, indeed, how tight those races were.
The magnitude 7.4 earthquake that rocked Taiwan on April 3 killed at least 10 people, injured more than 1,000 and trapped many others, according to initial reports. The powerful quake also damaged roads and more than 100 buildings.
But one viral video that an X user claimed showed some of the earthquake’s destruction is misrepresented.
“Houses of cards collapse: An entire block of unfinished houses collapsed as a result of an earthquake in Taiwan,” a paid X subscriber wrote in one April 3 post that included a video of several light-colored high-rise buildings crumpling to the ground in a cloud of dust. “Death toll from Taiwan earthquake rises to 934 – local media.”
Other X users later appended a community note, X’s term for user-submitted context that sometimes appears on posts if a consensus of users deem it incorrect or misleading.
(Screenshot from X.)
The community note is correct: This video does not show damage in Taiwan from the earthquake. News reports and earlier posts of the video show that the clip captured the 2021 controlled demolition of buildings in China.
We also found no reports that the death toll from the quake has surpassed 10 people. As of about 11 a.m. Eastern time April 4, 11 people remained missing and more than 700 needed rescue, ABC News reported.
A reverse-image search of frames of the video shows that the video predates the April 3 earthquake. In one clip, which was posted to YouTube June 24, 2023, the description read: “15 building(s) demolished in China.”
USA Today in August 2021 posted a video titled, “15 buildings in China get demolished simultaneously.” The footage is not identical to the X post’s clip, but the buildings and the way they collapse is visually similar — down to the fact that one structure remains upright even after it appears to partially collapse.
“The 15 buildings that stood next to each other for seven years were demolished in China,” reads the video description. “They were abandoned with rain damage.”
The video clip from the X post was also falsely tied to the deadly earthquake in Turkey and Syria in 2023, Agence France-Presse Fact Check reported.
We rate the claim that this video shows that “an entire block of unfinished houses collapsed as a result of an earthquake in Taiwan” False.
The Earth has only one natural satellite — the moon. But social media users claim the Earth has three moons, and NASA is shooting three rockets at them April 8, the day of the total solar eclipse.
“NASA is shooting up three rockets on the eclipse. Guess what they’re calling it? Serpent’s deity,” he said. “Shooting three rockets at three moons.”
(Screenshot from Facebook)
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
NASA is not shooting three rockets at three moons. It is launching three sounding rockets April 8 into the “moon’s shadow” to “study how Earth’s upper atmosphere is affected when sunlight momentarily dims over a portion of the planet.” Sounding rockets can take science instruments between 30 to 300 miles above Earth’s surface. Because sounding rockets never enter orbit, they need neither expensive boosters nor extended tracking coverage.
The rockets will study changes in the ionosphere caused by the eclipse. The ionosphere is an electrified region 55 to 310 miles above Earth’s surface that “reflects and refracts radio signals.” The mission aims to collect data on potential disturbances that may interfere with communications.
According to NASA, the sounding rockets of the Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path, or APEP, mission are expected to reach a maximum altitude of 260 miles, or 420 kilometers. That distance pales compared with the average distance to the moon, which is 238,855 miles. The moon’s path around Earth is elliptical, so the moon’s distance from the Earth varies.
This is not the first time NASA will conduct such a mission. The sounding rockets were also launched during the October 2023 solar eclipse. The name APEP was chosen for the same-named serpent deity from ancient Egyptian mythology. Apep supposedly pursued the sun deity Ra and “every so often nearly consumed him, resulting in an eclipse.”
We rate the claim that NASA is “shooting three rockets at three moons” False.
RELATED: No, NASA doesn’t have a mission to cause ‘mass psychosis’ during the April 8 solar eclipse
Directed energy weapons are real and fire concentrated electromagnetic energy at light speed. These weapons include high-energy lasers, high-power microwaves and radio frequency devices. The United States and other countries are researching using directed-energy weapons for military purposes.
What do these weapons have to do with the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore? Absolutely nothing, despite what some social media posts claim.
About a week after a cargo ship crashed into one of the bridge’s supports and caused the bridge’s collapse, an Instagram account shared a familiar conspiracy theory that the bridge was intentionally destroyed using directed energy weapons.
“Is Baltimore bridge planned collapse?” read text on a photo of the bridge. “Was the Baltimore bridge targeted with energy weapons?”
The post’s caption claimed the bridge collapse was “a stealth plot planned in advance.”
(Screengrab from Instagram)
The investigation into the March 26 Baltimore bridge collapse continues, but there is no evidence supporting this claim. Over the past year, we’ve documented similar false claims that linked wildfires in the United States (Texas and Hawaii), Canada and Russia to directed energy weapons.
The Instagram post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
Let’s review what happened:
At about 1:30 a.m., March 26, the 984-foot-long Dali cargo ship, weighing 112,000 gross tons, or about 248 million pounds, collided with the 1.6-mile bridge. Minutes before the crash, the local pilot issued a mayday call to say the ship had lost power and warn officials to stop traffic from crossing the bridge.
Video footage shows the ship hitting one of the bridge’s support columns, causing the rest of the bridge to collapse into the Patapsco River. The National Transportation Safety Board, the independent federal agency that is leading the investigation into the crash, said audio recordings from the ship reported sounds consistent with a collision.
Federal and Maryland officials said they do not think the ship’s crash into the bridge was intentional. Officials have called the event an accident.
We rate the claim that Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge was “targeted with energy weapons” Pants on Fire!
RELATED: Baltimore bridge collapse: A cyberattack, a movie and other false claims about the ship accident
