¿Es cierto que el periodista de Univision Jorge Ramos reportó sobre un perdón de deudas de tarjetas de crédito? No, Ramos no dijo eso, ese video fue manipulado.
El video en Facebook muestra a Ramos supuestamente diciendo: “La nueva ley de empoderamiento económico elimina entre $15,000 y $100,000 de deuda de tarjeta de crédito para todos los estadounidenses hispanos”.
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).
Otras publicaciones similares con la imagen Ramos también prometen borrar deudas a los hispanoamericanos.
Pero estas afirmaciones son falsas. No hay ninguna “ley de empoderamiento económico” que elimine deudas.
El video mezcla la imagen de Ramos extraída de “Al Punto”, el programa semanal que él presenta en Univision, junto con rótulos falsos y una voz manipulada.
Asimismo, el video muestra imágenes de la congresista demócrata Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, y cartas que supuestamente reciben los peticionarios de los beneficios de la ley con mensajes de “aprobado”.
La voz de fondo que suena como la de Ramos dice, “adjuntaré el sitio web a continuación. Responde dos preguntas y eliminarán tu deuda. El programa termina esta semana, el 9 de marzo”. Pero no hay ningún enlace a una página web.
“Al Punto” publicó un reportaje en noviembre de 2023 diciendo que la voz de Ramos “fue clonada con inteligencia artificial para darle credibilidad a un supuesto servicio de alivio de deudas”.
Ramos en mayo de 2023 alertó en X sobre el uso de su nombre e imagen en falsos comerciales; él también publicó algo similar en su página web.
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).
Calificamos la publicación que usa la imagen de Ramos para decir que una nueva ley elimina entre $15,000 y $100,000 de deuda de tarjeta de crédito para los hispanos como Falsa.
Lee más:
El tan solo ganar menos de $50,000 al año no garantiza seguro de salud gratuito
Orden ejecutiva de Biden no proporciona cuidado de salud gratuito a los hispanos en EE.UU.
No, no hay ninguna ley que elimine hasta $15,000 de deuda a los estadounidenses
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 New York state legislators weigh tougher laws on building design and outdoor lighting, one state senator cited the harm to birds caused by building collisions in New York City and beyond.
In February, Flaco, a male Eurasian eagle-owl, died from crashing into a Manhattan building. Flaco had attracted local and national attention after escaping from the Central Park Zoo and surviving in the wild despite having been raised in captivity.
State Sen. Brad Holyman-Sigal, D-Manhattan, supports two bills that would protect birds from collisions: S.7663, which would regulate outdoor night lighting, and S.7098, which would require certain state-owned buildings to be modified to reduce bird deaths. Committees are considering the bills.
On Feb. 26, days after Flaco’s death become public, Holyman-Sigal said in a statement that “nearly a quarter million birds in New York City, and more than one billion across the country, die each year from collisions with buildings.”
We found that published research supports this estimate of birth deaths. However, experts cautioned that this is a tricky statistic to calculate, and the data that Holyman-Sigal’s office cited to support his statement is about a decade old.
What does the data show?
Holyman-Sigal’s numbers for New York City stem from data collected by NYC Audubon, an environmental group devoted to protecting birds and bird habitats.
Dustin Partridge, the group’s director of conservation and science, said that collision monitoring efforts reported between 90,000 and 243,000 birds dying from collisions every year in New York City.
Holyman-Sigal’s figure resides on the upper end of that range, and it was published in 2014 based on 2013 data, making it just more than a decade old.
However, Partridge said that this range could be low, as the city’s building count has expanded during the past decade. Today, New York City has more glass than it did in 2013, Partridge said, potentially lowering bird survival rates.
As for the national figure, that’s well within the range of a recent Wilson Journal of Ornithology paper co-authored by Daniel Klem Jr., a professor of biology at Muhlenberg College.
That article said that nationally, 621 million to 2 billion birds die annually in the U.S. from collisions, with potentially billions more dying similarly worldwide. According to that paper, half of bird-window collisions leave no evidence of a strike, potentially producing artificially lower numbers for deadly collisions.
Scott Loss, a professor of global change ecology and management at Oklahoma State University, said such estimates are broadly in line with those in a 2014 journal article he helped write.
Still, Joel Best, a University of Delaware sociology professor who has written about bird strike estimation, cautioned against trusting estimates of a topic that is so hard to track. Humans can’t monitor all birds, he said. Although a large number of bird collisions surely occur, he added, bird welfare advocates have an incentive “to exaggerate the size of their social problems,” Best said.
Our ruling
Holyman-Sigal said, “Nearly a quarter million birds in New York City, and more than one billion across the country, die each year from collisions with buildings.”
Estimating the number of bird deaths is difficult, and even the best academic attempts have described broad ranges.
However, published data supports both Holyman-Sigal’s number for New York City and his number for the U.S. as a whole. The New York City number is a decade old, but experts say that more buildings and glass mean that the old estimate could be low.
After decades of creating laws that assumed “sex” and “gender” were synonymous, lawmakers across the country are taking another look at how states define those terms.
Scientific and legal interpretations of these words have evolved considerably in the past century. Today, medical experts understand biological sex assigned at birth as more complex and consider it distinct from gender identity.
In 2020, the Supreme Court also broadened its understanding of sex discrimination in employment to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Grappling with this cultural, scientific, and legal shift in the meaning of “sex” and “gender,” lawmakers in some states have tried defining the terms narrowly in state law as biological and binary. In 2023, four states passed such laws and, this year, 17 states introduced bills defining “sex.” Some bills in Florida and West Virginia were defeated, but 15 bills are still advancing in states across the country.
This focus on terminology may seem rhetorical, but these legislative changes can restrict access to driver’s licenses and documents that match a person’s gender identity. Transgender rights advocates say that requiring IDs to match the sex a person was assigned at birth can expose transgender Americans to discrimination.
So, how do we understand these terms, and what could these definitions mean for everyday life once codified?
How have the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ evolved?
Until the mid-20th century, Americans’ understanding of “sex” was largely biological and binary.
“For a substantial time period, law in the United States defined identity categories, such as race and sex, in biological terms,” said Darren Hutchinson, an law professor at Emory University law professor.
In the 1950s and ’60s, psychological research emerged that differentiated biological sex from “gender.” Researchers coined terms such as “gender roles” as they studied people born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that didn’t fit the typical definitions of male or female and observed how children sometimes developed identity distinct from their biological sex.
By the early 1960s, the term “gender identity” began appearing in academic literature. By 1980, “gender identity disorder of childhood” was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ third edition. This inclusion signaled that the concept of gender identity “was part of the accepted nomenclature being used,” said Dr. Jack Drescher, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University.
Before the 1970s, the word “gender” was rarely used in American English, according to research by Stefan Th. Gries, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He said evidence suggests it was used mostly when discussing grammar to describe the “gender” of a noun in Spanish, for example.
Edward Schiappa, a professor of communication and rhetoric at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, observed in his book “The Transgender Exigency” that the rising use of “gender” in English coincided with the term’s introduction into psychological literature and its adoption by the feminist movement. Feminists saw the term as useful for describing the cultural aspects of being a “woman” as different from the biological aspects, he said.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who argued sex discrimination cases before the court in the 1970s, said that she intentionally used the term “gender discrimination” because it lacked the salacious overtones “sex” has.
After the 1980s, gender’s term usage rose rapidly, moving beyond academic and activist circles. In common American English, “sex” and “gender” began to be used more interchangeably, including in state law — sometimes even in the same section of the law.
In Florida’s chapter on driver’s licenses, for example, the section on new license applications uses “gender,” but the section on replacement licenses uses “sex.”
Modern legal and scientific views of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’
Today, medical experts and most major medical organizations agree that sex and gender are different.
Sex is a biological category determined by physical features such as genes, hormones and genitalia. People are male, female or sometimes have reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t fit the typical definitions of male or female, often called intersex.
Gender is different, experts say. Gender identity refers to someone’s internal sense of being a man, woman, or a nonbinary gender. For cisgender people, their sex and gender are the same, while transgender people may experience a mismatch between the two — their gender may not correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth.
Our legal understanding of “sex discrimination” has also evolved.
In 2020, the Supreme Court decided Bostock v. Clayton County, a series of cases in which employers were accused of firing employees for being gay or transgender. The court held that this was a form of “sex discrimination” prohibited under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Whether the court will extend this interpretation to other areas of federal law is unclear, legal experts told us.
How have lawmakers responded to this shift?
Recently, lawmakers have tried to codify their understandings of “sex” and “gender” into law.
In some cases, these laws aim to recognize and protect transgender Americans. The Democratic-backed Equality Act, which passed the House, but not the Senate, in 2019 and 2021, would have federally protected against discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation and gender identity. Some states have passed similar equality legislation, creating a patchwork of anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people.
But lawmakers in many Republican-led states have proposed narrow definitions of sex and gender that would apply to large sections of state law. “Women and men are not identical; they possess unique biological differences,” Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds said in a press release detailing her support for the state’s version of such a bill. She added, “This bill protects women’s spaces and rights afforded to us by Iowa law and the Constitution.”
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds speaks July 28, 2023, at the Republican Party of Iowa’s 2023 Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP)
Opponents reject the idea that the bills relate to women’s rights and claim the bills are an attempt to “erase” legal recognition of transgender people.
In 2023, four states passed laws defining sex, and two other states did so via executive order.
The Kansas Legislature, for example, passed the “Women’s Bill of Rights” overriding Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto. The law says that “pursuant to any state law or rules and regulations … An individual’s ‘sex’ means such individual’s biological sex, either male or female, at birth.”
The law defines male and female as based on whether a person’s reproductive system “is developed to produce ova,” or “is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.”
Because of the bill, transgender Kansans may no longer amend the sex listed on their birth certificates or update their driver’s licenses to be different from their sex assigned at birth, although courts are reviewing this policy.
The Kansas law also states that “distinctions between the sexes with respect to athletics, prisons or other detention facilities, domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, locker rooms, restrooms and other areas where biology, safety or privacy are implicated” are related to “important governmental objectives” a condition required under the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Rose Saxe, lawyer and deputy project director of the LGBTQ and HIV project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the Kansas law does not explicitly require those spaces to be segregated by “sex” as the bill defines, but tries to justify policies that would do so.
Current bills defining ‘sex’
This year, 17 more states considered bills that would narrowly define “sex” and/or “gender” in state law according to the ACLU’s anti-LGBTQ legislation tracker. One, Utah, signed a definition into law, and 10 other states are advancing 15 bills combined. In the remaining six states, the bills were carried over to next year or defeated.
The Utah State Capitol is viewed March 1, 2024, in Salt Lake City. (AP)
Some bills, such as Arizona’s S.B. 1628 change the terms for the entire statute: “This state shall replace the stand-alone term ‘gender’ with ‘sex’ in all laws, rules, publications, orders, actions, programs, policies, and signage,” it reads. The state Senate passed the bill 16-13 on Feb. 22, along party lines with Republicans in favor.
Other bills, such as Idaho’s H.B. 421, don’t replace the word “gender” but declare it synonymous to “sex.” Gender, when used in state law, “shall be considered a synonym for ‘sex’ and shall not be considered a synonym for gender identity, an internal sense of gender, experienced gender, gender expression, or gender role,” reads the text of the bill, which passed the Idaho House 54-14 on Feb. 7.
Saxe said the bills could have a cascading effect on other laws.
Two bills in Florida, neither of which passed, would have explicitly required driver’s licenses to reflect sex assigned at birth. Advocates, including Saxe, worry that other sex-defining bills would have a similar consequence.
Transgender rights advocates say access to identification that matches an individual’s identity and presentation is important. “If you can’t update the gender marker on your ID, you are essentially outed as transgender at every turn,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality to PolitiFact for a previous story on drivers licenses in Florida. This can happen during interactions with potential landlords, employers, cashiers, bartenders and restaurant servers.
Kentucky and Georgia are following Kansas’s lead and considering their own “Women’s Bill of Rights” based on model legislation created by the conservative advocacy group, Independent Women’s Voice, and the Women’s Liberation Front, a feminist group opposing what it terms “gender ideology.”
There are variations. The bill in Georgia, for example, would remove “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” from the state’s definition of a hate crime.
“Even in the states that have passed these bills,” said Paisley Currah, a political science professor at the City University of New York, “there’s still going to be these contradictions,” because a person’s driver’s license might not match the gender on their passport, for example.
“Unless you’re a prisoner or immigrant or you are in the Army, the government actually doesn’t get to look at your body,” said Currah, who wrote a book on how government agencies address “sex” categories. “It’s always some doctor that signs a letter … and so there’s always a document between your body and the state.”
How these sex-defining laws would affect state agencies remains to be seen. And the laws may face court challenges, likely on the grounds that they violate the Equal Protection Clause or right to privacy, Saxe said.
A group of about 100 migrants breached razor wire and overran Texas National Guard members March 21 in El Paso, in a chaotic scene captured on video.
One social media user juxtaposed that video with another video of politicians dancing in a March 21 Instagram post to make a point about Congress.
“Our borders are wide open and this is what they’re doing in Congress,” the post’s caption said. “El Paso is being overrun while our elected officials dance at work.”
The 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.)
(Instagram screenshot)
It’s possible that the comparison was meant as a metaphor, but people commenting on the post took it quite literally. “That’s your Democratic party,” one person said. “Get rid of them all,” said another.
We found other social media posts using the dancing video in a similar fashion.
But the video does not show legislators dancing in the halls of Congress. It was taken May 2, 2023, in the Florida House.
The video has been the subject of misinformation before. In May, PolitiFact examined a TikTok claim that the video showed Florida legislators dancing after passing an anti-trans bill.
That wasn’t true, either.
Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, told PolitiFact then that music is often played on the state House floor before legislative sessions.
May 2 was “Boots Day,” she said, and lawmakers were encouraged to wear boots. Legislators danced in the House chamber’s center aisle to the “Cha Cha Slide” and “Cupid Shuffle,” but not in response to any votes, Eskamani said.
In Congress, meanwhile, both chambers have bickered in recent months over border funding legislation.
Senate Republicans blocked a wide-ranging bipartisan border security and foreign aid package in February after former President Donald Trump criticized the deal and House Speaker Mike Johnson said it would be “dead on arrival” if it reached the House.
On March 22, the House passed a $1.2 trillion spending bill to avoid a partial government shutdown and fund the government through September. As of this writing, the Senate had not acted on the bill, which must pass by midnight March 23 to avoid a shutdown. The bill includes additional money for border security, The New York Times reported.
Although legislators haven’t reached agreement on a border bill, there’s no evidence that they were dancing in the halls of Congress. The claim is False.
As the Russian offensive against Ukraine continues, Instagram users reacted to a video showing what looks like the presidents of France and Ukraine having the time of their lives.
Part of the clip showed a montage of what looked like French President Emmanuel Macron dancing in different outfits and hairstyles, wearing makeup and wigs. Another portion showed someone resembling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy belly dancing in a red outfit.
“Presidente de Francia Macron??? Presidente de Ucrania Zelenski???” read the text in the March 19 Instagram video. Translated from Spanish, it says, “President of France Macron??? President of Ukraine Zelensky???”
(Screenshot from Instagram)
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.)
Reverse-image search results show these clips are fake.
Most clips from the Macron dancing montage appear to have been altered from videos uploaded by YouTube channel StratusDanceClub in a series called “Circa 1986-1987.” We skimmed this series and saw 14 out of 20 clips from the Instagram video — and none of them show Macron.
(Screenshots from Instagram, StratusDanceClub’s YouTube channel)
According to the YouTube channel’s bio, the Stratus dance club opened in San Diego in 1978 and closed in June 1987. Macron was born in December 1977 and would’ve been 9 years old when the club shuttered.
The video supposedly showing Zelenskyy belly dancing was also altered. We found a copy of the original video posted on Instagram Feb. 7, 2022, and the person dancing bears no resemblance to Zelenskyy. Fact-checkers found that TikTok user @vusaaal first posted the video in October 2020.
We rate the claim these videos show Macron and Zelenskyy dancing Pants on Fire!
A solar eclipse is coming, and viral misinformation is casting a shadow on the experience.
Ahead of the April 8 total eclipse, several social media posts claim officials in Travis County, Texas, home to Austin, are not telling the public about a major calamitous event linked to the eclipse.
The caption of an Instagram video showing officials talking about school closures and emergency declarations claimed: “They know something catastrophic will happen.”
In a separate post, a woman claims doom is on the horizon.
“They believe the hospitals will be full, there is going to be a lot of chaos going around, schools are going to be closed,” she said. “They are asking people to have two weeks’ worth of food. No signal? Something just doesn’t add up. We have had eclipses before and we have never seen this type of stuff.”
Both videos cite a news report from KTBC-TV showing city officials explaining preparations for the eclipse.
The Instagram 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.)
But these posts are misleading and promote conspiracy theories. We’ve seen similar posts in other areas within the path of totality.
A Travis County judge issued a local disaster declaration March 8 in anticipation of large crowds that will increase traffic and demand for emergency responders.
“What the disaster declaration does is it makes it easier for us to require things that are going to make it easier for emergency vehicles to get around,” Judge Andy Brown told KXAN-TV, an Austin NBC affiliate.
Under the rules, people hosting large viewing parties in unincorporated parts of the county have to disclose their party on a form available to first responders.
One eclipse forecasting model predicted as many as 3.7 million people will travel from other parts of the U.S. to towns and cities within the eclipse’s path of totality. For small towns, a sudden surge in large crowds could strain unprepared emergency services.
Part of the draw is the rarity of a total eclipse, when the sun will be completely blocked by the moon for three to four minutes in most places, according to NASA. The next total solar eclipse to be seen from the contiguous U.S. will be in 2044.
(NASA’s YouTube)
Some school districts have given students the day off. “The start of the school day could be an issue for campuses and, of course, pick up, right? Dismissal could also be a real challenge,” Marco Alvarado, Lake Travis Independent School District spokesperson, told Fox 7.
Large crowds in a small area using cellphones could also mean slower internet speeds; cellphone carriers have said they are working to reduce interruptions.
Travis County is not the only place in the eclipse’s path of totality that is preparing for large out-of-town visitors who would travel to view the rare astronomical event. PolitiFact has debunked claims that the Oklahoma’s National Guard’s deployment to prepare for eclipse crowds does not signal sinister motives.
We rate the claim that city officials preparing for the April 8 eclipse “know something catastrophic will happen” False.
COVID-19 vaccines are not “being used to cure cancer,” as social media posts falsely claim, misinterpreting President Joe Biden’s reference to mRNA cancer vaccines during his State of the Union address. Biden was referring to the mRNA technology used to make the COVID-19 vaccines and being studied by researchers to treat cancer.
Full Story
The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are the first vaccines using the messenger RNA technology to be approved for use, but they’re not the first ever developed. The history of mRNA vaccines started decades before the pandemic, and included research on mRNA cancer vaccines.
Unlike platforms used in other vaccines, the mRNA technology doesn’t directly introduce an antigen,such as a protein, into the body to trigger an immune response. Instead, mRNA encapsuled in a fatty envelope delivers instructions for cells to make proteins. The immune system responds by producing antibodies and immune cells, preparing the body to respond if it encounters these proteins again.
The research on cancer mRNA vaccines both enabled the development of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and was accelerated by it. Now, several clinical trials are testing mRNA vaccines to fight different kinds of cancers — and some have shown promising early results.
President Joe Biden referred to this success in his State of the Union address on March 7.
“The pandemic no longer controls our lives,” he said. “The vaccine that saved us from COVID is — are now being used to beat cancer. Turning setback into comeback. That’s what America does.”
The president’s message wasn’t entirely clear. He was referring to the technology used to create the COVID-19 vaccines, not the COVID-19 vaccines themselves. Biden’s imprecise wording allowed opponents of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines to twist his message on social media, where users misinterpreted Biden’s statement to claim the president was announcing the same vaccines used for COVID-19 were now being used to fight cancer.
“BREAKING: Biden announces that the COVID vaccine is now being used to cure cancer,” an Instagram user wrote on March 8. Similarly, comedian and conservative commentator Terrence K. Williams posted a Rumble video on Facebook titled, “JESUS!! Biden said the Covid Vaccine is being used to cure CANCER!!”
Comments on the social media posts repeated the unsupported claim that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer. As we’ve explained extensively, there’s no evidence to support that theory.
Philip Santangelo, a professor and cancer researcher at Emory University, told us he didn’t “think President Biden meant that literally” since COVID-19 vaccines “won’t help with cancer.” But Santangelo, who is leading a $24 million mRNA collaborative project funded by the federal government, said some of “the parts and pieces” of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine — the mRNA platform — is being used in cancer vaccines to train the immune system to fight the disease.
“He wasn’t wrong,” Santangelo told us in a phone interview in reference to Biden’s words. “I mean, you are still using that technology, but you’re not using it in exactly the same way.”
In fact, in August, when announcing the funding for Santangelo’s project, called Curing the Uncurable via RNA-Encoded Immunogene Tuning, as part of the White House Cancer Moonshot initiative, Biden used similar, but more detailed, language.
“Over the past few years, COVID-19 vaccines developed using mRNA technology have saved millions of lives around the world,” Biden said at the time. “Now, a skilled team at Emory University in Atlanta will work to adapt these technologies to turn more cancers into curable diseases. This is a bold endeavor that has the potential to transform the fight against cancer and other difficult diagnoses.”
mRNA Cancer Vaccines
Although no mRNA cancer vaccine has been authorized or approved for use yet, many are being studied to treat different kinds of cancers.
“There are dozens, if not hundreds, of ideas of how the platform could be used for cancer,” Dr. James A. Hoxie, emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and co-director of the Penn Institute of RNA Innovation, told us, referring to the potential of mRNA.
Illustration of a lipid nanoparticle containing mRNA. By Dr. Microbe / stock.adobe.com
Therapies using mRNA rely on decades of research, in which scientists have learned how to modify RNA and package it in vesicles of fat, or lipid nanoparticles, to protect the RNA from premature degradation.
COVID-19 took the mRNA platform to “the next level,” Santangelo told us, by accelerating the manufacturing process and its scalability. The COVID-19 pandemic also created the opportunity to test the platform’s safety and efficacy in large clinical trials and evaluate the vaccines’ performance in real life.
“The production of mRNA vaccines today is easy, fast, and can be scaled up as needed,” Norbert Pardi, assistant professor of microbiology at Penn Medicine and lead of the vaccine group at the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation, told Cancer Currents, the National Cancer Institute’s blog.
Investigational cancer vaccines use the same mRNA tool as their COVID-19 predecessors — a lipid nanoparticle with RNA inside. What changes is the information the mRNA is delivering to cells. (The cancer vaccines also differ from the COVID-19 vaccines in that they’re therapeutic, meaning they’re intended to treat people who have already been diagnosed with cancer.)
Hoxie compared it to looking at two different pills that look the same, but treat different diseases. “Under a microscope, a lipid nanoparticle for COVID would look like a lipid nanoparticle to treat pancreatic cancer,” he said. “It looks the same, but they’re different.”
COVID-19 vaccines instruct cells to make spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease. For the cancer vaccines, scientists are using this technology to instruct cells to produce proteins that are unique to cancer cells and not present in normal cells – specifically, tumor-specific antigens and neoantigens, new proteins that occur in cancer cells when they have mutated. Both can serve as good targets for vaccines and other immunotherapy because when the immune system sees these unfamiliar antigens, the body mounts a response and produces cytotoxic T cells that destroy tumor cells.
“Essentially, you can direct your immune system — that’s why it’s called a vaccine — to kill tumor cells,” Santangelo, who is working on different vaccine models for different kinds of tumors, told us.
“mRNA is just a relatively simple way to get cells to make proteins you want them to make, that’s it,” he said. “It’s a convenient platform that can be used to either, again, introduce cancer antigen to the immune system or express things like cytokines,” which are small proteins “that can help wake the immune system and get it revved up to go kill tumor cells.”
But the development of these cancer vaccines is challenging.
The diversity of tumors and antigens is one issue. Each cancer is different, and people’s cancers have unique combinations of mutations. To address this, researchers have been trying to use mRNA that can instruct cells to produce personalized neoantigens. The mRNA is manufactured after identifying mutations in samples from a patient’s cancerous cells. The process for making a personalized mRNA vaccine usually takes between one and two months, and the vaccine can include the genetic code for up to 34 different neoantigens, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Vaccines in Clinical Trials
One of the promising vaccine candidates in the pipeline is Merck and Moderna’s personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, known as mRNA-4157 or V940, which targets melanoma, the most serious kind of skin cancer.
In a phase 2 clinical trial that involved 157 high-risk patients who had undergone surgery, 50 received the standard treatment (pembrolizumab) and 107 received standard treatment and the vaccine. Results published in January show that recurrence-free survival, which the trial was primarily intended to measure, was longer with the combination of both therapies. The rate of recurrence or death over around two years of follow-up was 22% for those who received the vaccine versus 40% for those who did not. The most common side effects from the vaccine were fatigue, chills and pain at the injection site.
In July, the companies announced a phase 3 trial, which plans to enroll “1,089 patients at more than 165 sites in over 25 countries around the world.”
“I have every confidence that this strategy will be expanded to … non-small cell lung cancer, renal cell cancer, hepatocellular cancer, gastroesophageal cancer, et cetera,” Dr. Jeffrey S. Weber, deputy director of the Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone and a trial researcher, said at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, according to Medscape.
A second promising personalized mRNA vaccine, developed by BioNTech and Genentech, targets one of the most common and deadliest types of pancreatic cancer, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. In a phase 1 trial, of patients who have had surgery, 15 patients were treated with a drug called atezolizumab, nine doses of a vaccine with up to 20 personalized neoantigens and standard chemotherapy drugs for pancreatic cancer.
According to the results, the vaccine activated a strong T cell response against the neoantigens in half of the patients. These patients had a longer recurrence-free survival compared with those who didn’t show a T cell expansion. A phase 2 trial of the vaccine, called autogene cevumeran, started in October 2023 and hopes to enroll 260 participants in nearly 80 sites around the world.
“The evidence from the phase 1 trial showed that we are on the right track: An mRNA vaccine can trigger T cells to recognize pancreatic cancers as foreign,” Dr. Vinod Balachandran, who led a team from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said in a report from the center. “Moreover, the vaccines stimulated many such T cells, and we continued to detect T cells stimulated by such vaccines in patients up to two years later.”
Hoxie told us the results of these trials were impressive.
“In each case, it was an RNA vaccine platform that was generating an immune response that was capable of blunting, of decreasing the chance for relapse. So, what’s going to happen over time? Is that just delaying it, or is it really, totally preventing it? And, that’s what’s going to have to be seen,” he said. “But it gives you an idea why there’s excitement in the field — because you’ve done something with a vaccine that is changing the standard of care.”
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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Former President Donald Trump, facing a $454 million judgment in a New York business fraud case, called the amount “unprecedented, and practically impossible for any company.” His attorneys said he has been unable to secure a bond to cover it.
“A bond of the size set by the Democrat Club-controlled Judge, in Corrupt, Racist Letitia James’ unlawful Witch Hunt, is unConstitutional, un-American, unprecedented, and practically impossible for ANY Company, including one as successful as mine,” Trump wrote March 18 on his Truth Social platform. “The Bonding Companies have never heard of such a bond, of this size, before, nor do they have the ability to post such a bond, even if they wanted to.”
Trump is wrong in his characterization of the judgment’s relative size.
Experts said the judgment is high for a closely held, privately owned company such as the Trump Organization. But larger companies such as multinational corporations have paid for appeals bonds of $1 billion or more.
PolitiFact contacted Trump’s campaign for comment but didn’t receive a response by publication.
What is the bond amount based on?
The judgment was issued in a civil fraud lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who argued that the Trump Organization inflated the value of its assets to obtain more favorable loan and insurance terms.
When the state won the case in February, Judge Arthur Engoron ordered Trump to pay a nearly half-billion dollar judgment, including about $100 million in interest. (The total judgment comes to about $464 million when including the nearly $10 million Trump’s adult sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., were ordered to pay). Trump has to post the cash or a bond by March 25, 30 days from the judgment entry.
The judgment calculation stemmed from two things: the court’s estimate of profits lost by lenders if Trump had accurately portrayed his properties’ value; and profits from the sale of two properties — Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., and a suburban New York City golf course — that the company might not have been able to develop without the financing it received.
Securing an appellate bond means a company vouches the penalty will eventually be paid if an appeals court upholds it. Bonds are typically backed with a mix of cash and assets for collateral equal to 110% of the total judgment, and are returned if the defendant wins on appeal.
In a March 18 court filing, Trump’s attorneys said that Trump had approached 30 companies through four brokers but failed to secure an appeal bond. The lawyers argued that companies are generally unable to guarantee bonds that large, and said the companies told Trump they can’t accept real estate as collateral.
Lawyers for James’ office responded in a court filing that Trump has other options, including dividing the bonds among different companies or letting a court hold some of his real estate during appeal.
Trump’s attorneys haven’t said why the bond cannot be split between multiple companies, or if Trump has explored that option. James started the process of seizing some of Trump’s assets, filing a judgment March 21 in Westchester County, where his golf course and private estate Seven Springs are.
How does the scale of this judgment compare?
This judgment’s size is not unprecedented, according to examples provided by James’ office and an expert we contacted. A judgment that big is more common in cases involving large or multinational corporations than with a privately owned, closely held company such as the Trump Organization.
Pinning down Trump’s net worth is tricky; he doesn’t have to produce the same financial disclosures as publicly traded companies. In September, Forbes estimated his net worth for all holdings at $2.6 billion.
James’ office sent PolitiFact examples of companies in civil litigation cases in a variety of jurisdictions posting bonds of $1 billion or more on appeal. They include a $1 billion bond for Samsung in 2014, a $1 billion bond for Cox Communications in 2021, and a $1.3 billion bond for SAP, a German software company, in 2011.
Each of those companies has annual revenue of at least $10 billion, so they are much larger than Trump’s combined holdings.
A closer example is Marvell Semiconductor, a company that manufactures computer circuits. Its parent company has $5.5 billion in annual revenue, and it posted a $1.5 billion bond in 2014 over a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Carnegie Mellon University.
“Civil and criminal penalties against large publicly traded companies can run in the billions, but the Trump Organization is fairly small” by comparison, Joan Meyer, who has worked as a federal and local level prosecutor and is now a partner at the law firm Thompson Hine LLP, told PolitiFact.
Meyer said it’s not surprising Trump is having difficulty finding a company to act as a guarantor, given the judgment’s size and the risk of backing him.
“Trump does not have the liquid assets to bring the bond amount down, and real estate is rarely used as collateral because it is very difficult to value certain pieces of property — particularly so with Trump, who is in possession of large estates and golf courses,” Meyer said. “Moreover, any company that is willing to extend that kind of bond to Trump would likely demand an extremely large fee percentage to take on that risk.”
Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor who is now a litigator in private practice in New York, told CNN the judgment against Trump is notably large.
In a case filing, Senior Assistant Solicitor General Dennis Fan pushed back on Trump’s request to halt the order, writing that there is “nothing unusual” about billion-dollar judgments being fully bonded on appeal.
“Defendants object to a possible ‘fire sale’ if they were to sell assets to generate cash to use as collateral for a bond or as a deposit, but the alternative would be to shift the risk of executing on defendants’ illiquid assets to” the attorney general’s office, Fan wrote.
Our ruling
Trump said the $454 million bond he’s been assessed is “unprecedented, and practically impossible for ANY Company” to pay.
It’s not unprecedented — some large companies have previously posted appellate bonds of $1 billion or more.
Larger appeal bonds have typically stemmed from cases involving large or multinational conglomerates, rather than closely held, privately owned companies such as Trump’s.
The statement contains an element of truth; experts have said the judgment against Trump’s company is notably large. But it ignores critical facts about other companies that have paid even larger judgments. We rate it Mostly False.
RELATED: New York officials didn’t value Mar-a-Lago at $18 million. A Palm Beach property appraiser did.
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Quick Take
Local governments are preparing residents for an influx of visitors during the April 8 solar eclipse that will be most visible along a narrow path through the U.S., with one Oklahoma county inviting the National Guard for support. But social media posts baselessly claim the preparations suggest “something catastrophic” will occur during the eclipse.
Full Story
A total solar eclipse — in which the moon briefly blocks the face of the sun — will be visible on a narrow path from western Mexico, through the United States, and into Maritime Canada on April 8. At locations along the “path of totality” where the astronomical alignment can be best viewed, the full eclipse will last four and a half minutes. The last time the U.S. experienced a total eclipse was in August 2017, and the next opportunity to see one in the U.S. will be in August 2044.
National agencies and local governments have been preparing for the impact the event will have on towns along the path of the total eclipse due to the number of visitors expected at those locations.
People attend a solar eclipse viewing event at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles on Aug. 21, 2017. Photo by Xinhua/Zhao Hanrong via Getty Images.
In advance of the partial eclipse in 2023 and the total eclipse in 2024, the U.S. Department of Transportation published a fact sheet that explained, “Because a solar eclipse is a relatively rare type of planned special event, it can generate large volumes of traffic for which State and local departments of transportation (DOTs) will need to prepare.” That fact sheet also noted that the total eclipse in 2017 “created delays and queuing on rural interstates and highways across the Nation.”
The health department of Oswego County, New York, like many counties that will have a view of the total eclipse, has suggested that residents fill up vehicle gasoline tanks and buy groceries before visitors arrive in the area. Lorain County, Ohio, has advised that cell phone signals may be lost “due to system overload” caused by the influx of visitors. Many school districts will close or have early dismissals to allow students to experience the eclipse.
But some social media posts are making unfounded claims that the government preparations for the eclipse are signs of something ominous.
Counties Anticipate Crowds, Call in Support
The text on a March 19 Instagram post reads, “1 month Before the ECLIPSE They are Declaring State of Disaster!” An unidentified woman in the video in the post says, in part, “What in the world is really going on? A month before the eclipse, Travis County [Texas] declares a state of emergency, and also asks for help because they believe their hospitals are going to be full. There’s going to be a lot of chaos going around. Schools are going to be closed. … No signal. Something just doesn’t add up. We’ve had eclipses before and we’ve never seen this type of stuff.”
Another Instagram post about preparations in Travis County, Texas, misleadingly claims, “They know something catastrophic will happen.”
It’s true that Travis County, Texas, issued a disaster declaration on March 8. The city of Lago Vista explained why on its website on March 11: “Travis County Judge Andy Brown declared a local state of disaster in anticipation of extremely large crowds, increased traffic and strains on first responders, hospitals and roads since we are in the direct path of totality for the eclipse. This disaster declaration will allow first responders and public safety officials to better manage traffic and crowds as we are expected to have our population double in size for this once in a lifetime phenomenon.”
A viral TikTok post shared on Facebook questions why McCurtain County, Oklahoma, is calling up the National Guard during the eclipse. “This is getting wild. The National Guard is going to be here now for the solar eclipse. … But things get much weirder.” The video’s narrator then says “an elite chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear unit” also will be housed nearby during the eclipse. The narrator adds, “People are going on Twitter making statements like this, ‘Something strange is definitely happening.’”
Oklahoma National Guard troops will indeed be on hand during the event, and a statement from the Guard explained their role.
“McCurtain County Emergency Management requested our support because they expect up to 100,000 additional people visiting their communities to watch the eclipse,” Lt. Col. Jabonn Flurry, commander of the 63rd Civil Support Team, said in a March 18 press release from the Oklahoma National Guard. “This influx of visitors has the potential to overtax local resources and thanks to the training and experience our Guardsmen have working alongside local agencies all across Oklahoma, the CST is uniquely qualified to support our fellow Oklahomans.”
The press release also said, “In the event of a HAZMAT emergency like an industrial fire that requires specialized training, the 63rd CST’s resources will respond, allowing local emergency responders to continue their assistance to citizens and the expected increase of visitors.”
The release didn’t mention the post’s claim about an “elite chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear unit,” but it noted: “Members of the 63rd CST receive more than 650 hours of HAZMAT and high-tech training from agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Energy, the Department of Justice, and the Environmental Protection Agency.”
This is not the first time local governments have geared up for the impact of an eclipse, contrary to what some social media posts claim. The Oregon Office of Emergency Management prepared for a year ahead of the 2017 eclipse. The National Park Service suggested stocking up with food, water and gas in preparation for viewing the 2017 eclipse in Grand Teton National Park. The state of Wyoming also experienced unanticipated, record-breaking traffic jams after the eclipse that year.
NASA recommends that everyone viewing the eclipse follow health and safety measures, including the use of specialized eye protection or indirect viewing equipment.
Sources
City of Lago Vista, Texas. “Disaster Declaration issued ahead of the 4/8/24 Solar Eclipse.” 11 Mar 2024.
Lorain County, Ohio, Commissioners. “April 8th, 2024 Total Solar Eclipse.” Accessed 21 Mar 2024.
McCullough, Erin. “Rutherford County Schools closing for solar eclipse April 8.” WKRN. 21 Mar 2024.
NASA. “2024 Total Solar Eclipse.” Accessed 20 Mar 2024.
NASA. “Eclipse Safety.” Accessed 21 Mar 2024.
National Park Service. Grand Teton National Park. “2017 Total Solar Eclipse.” 21 Aug 2017.
Oklahoma National Guard. Press release. “Oklahoma National Guard to assist McCurtain County amid influx of eclipse tourism.” 18 Mar 2024.
Oregon Department of Emergency Management. “Hazards and Preparedness: 2017 Total Solar Eclipse.” Accessed 22 Mar 2024.
Oswego County Health Department. “Be Ready For Total Solar Eclipse On April 8.” 21 Feb 2024.
Peek, Katie. “Here Are the Best Places to View the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse.” Scientific American. 2 Feb 2024.
Rainey, Libby. “Wyoming solar eclipse traffic jam was one for the record books.” Denver Post. Updated 23 Aug 2017.
Somers, Jennifer. “These St. Louis-area schools will be closed for the April 8 solar eclipse.” KSDK-TV. Updated 21 Mar 2024.
Travis County, Texas. “Travis County Declaration of Local Disaster Due April 8, 2024 Solar Eclipse.” 8 Mar 2024.
U.S. Department of Transportation. Fact sheet. “Preparing for a Solar Eclipse.” Accessed 21 Mar 2024.
Crime is always a big issue during election season, and in Wisconsin, there are already hints at how the topic might be discussed as things heat up toward November.
Even though the state’s governorship isn’t on the ballot this year, the Republican Party of Wisconsin recently took a shot at Gov. Tony Evers regarding Milwaukee’s crime numbers.
In a January post on X (formerly known as Twitter), the state GOP’s account said Evers’ 2023 record included “Milwaukee suffering from the third-highest violent crime rate in America.” It listed two other items and concluded that “Wisconsin deserves better in 2024.”
About a month later, Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, whose office is on the April ballot, made his own assertion in an X post: “Because of our partnership with police and the community, in Milwaukee we saw double digit decreases in homicide, vehicle theft, and property crime from 2022 to 2023.”
There are plenty of misunderstandings about crime and how it’s measured in the U.S. Are the two statements accurate? Do they even represent a fair way of judging crime trends in a city?
Time for a closer look.
Ranking cities based on crime rates is not considered a good idea
Matt Fisher, the state GOP’s spokesperson, said the source behind the party’s post was a story by Spectrum News 1. That story cited a May 2023 report from SafeHome.org about cities with the highest crime rates.
For one, that SafeHome.org report is based on FBI data from 2021, not 2023.
It wasn’t until March 2024 that the FBI made preliminary data available for nationwide crime trends in 2023, and nothing firmer than that is expected until the fall.
But even the FBI warns against ranking and comparing cities based on its data “because there are many factors that cause the nature and type of crime to vary from place to place.”
The agency lists more than a dozen, including population density, urbanization, economic conditions, transportation, cultural factors, climate and strength of law enforcement.
There’s one other factor the FBI cites that’s particularly important, and particularly important as it relates to 2021 crime data — how crime is reported.
There are two components to consider. One is that the majority of violent and property crimes aren’t reported to law enforcement.
The federal government conducts a National Crime Victimization Survey, which measures how much crimes are underreported. Surveys each year from 2019 through 2022 suggest that only four out of 10 violent victimizations are reported to police. One in three property victimizations are reported.
The second component deals with how well the FBI collected crime data in 2021.
2021 FBI crime data is not reliable
The crime data the FBI collected for 2021 is flawed and “particularly useless,” said Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst who runs AH Datalytics, a data analysis research firm.
That year, the FBI switched to a system of collecting data from law enforcement agencies across the country. The goal is to produce more nuanced crime data. Asher said the switch was a mess in its first year. When normally around 95% of agencies would report crime data to the FBI, in 2021, a little more than half reported, he said.
For example, Asher said, of the cities with a population of 500,000 to 1 million — which would include Milwaukee — only 24 of them reported data in 2021, compared with 35 in 2022.
Asher said SafeHome.org’s conclusion about Milwaukee’s violent crime is accurate based on its methodology and the data it had.
But he also said it was “like saying the Saints are the best professional football team in Louisiana. If you’ve got a very narrow definition of your problem, then you can use the data to work however you want.
“I certainly would advise against using rankings from websites that are using old data that aren’t acknowledging severe problems with the underlying data.”
Comparing Milwaukee with Milwaukee
In general, Asher said it’s better to judge a city’s crime numbers by measuring how they’ve changed over time.
That’s what Johnson did in his post, although he only compared two years of data. But his claim is correct, according to the Milwaukee Police Department. The city had double-digit percentage drops in homicides (20%), car theft (23%) and property crime (13%) from 2022 to 2023.
Of course, the further back you look, the more perspective you get.
In 2020, the U.S. had a historic 29% increase in homicides, while violent crime in general rose 5.6%, according to the FBI. Those trends are often attributed to the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd. Car theft has also skyrocketed nationally in recent years.
The country has slowly been recovering since. But homicides, aggravated assaults and car theft remain high in cities across the nation compared with 2019, according to the Council on Criminal Justice.
That’s true in Milwaukee, too. According to police data, homicides (74%), aggravated assaults (20%) and car theft (79%) were still up in 2023 compared to 2019, despite big drops compared with 2022.
