Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum’s founder and executive chair, has become something of a conspiracy theorist’s bogeyman in recent years.
In 2023, we fact-checked claims that Schwab:
With those False ratings in mind, if a social media post claims Schwab said something inflammatory, it bears a second look — so a post pointing to an alleged Schwab sentiment caught our eye.
“Klaus Schwab Admits ‘Political Revolution’ Against The ‘Great Reset’ Is Destroying His Agenda,” read the headline in a Jan. 20 Instagram 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.)
The original article with that matching headline was published Jan. 19 on The People’s Voice, a website known for spreading misinformation. We’ve repeatedly fact-checked the site’s false headlines, and Baxter Dmitry — who wrote the article — is a byline seen often on misinformation sites.
(Screenshot from Instagram)
The article does not attribute the headline’s sentiments to Schwab. It doesn’t quote Schwab at all, but an X post embedded in the story includes a clip of Schwab delivering a speech.
“You have this anti-system movement,” Schwab says in the clip. “What we are seeing is a revolution against the system. So, fixing the present system is not enough.”
PolitiFact contacted the World Economic Forum, but did not immediately hear back. A World Economic Forum spokesperson told The Associated Press that the speech in the X post was from 2017.
Schwab spoke about “the challenges of globalism” at the 2017 World Governments Summit.
Schwab’s 2017 remarks contained no mention of “The Great Reset” — the name given to a set of World Economic Forum policy ideas for economic recovery during the pandemic.
The initiative became a widely debunked conspiracy theory, with proponents believing elites aiming to establish a totalitarian global regime used the coronavirus to depopulate Earth and reorganize society.
Schwab delivered his 2017 speech well before the “Great Reset” pandemic recovery concept existed.
We found no other published articles or credible information that show Schwab ever said a revolution is destroying his “Great Reset” agenda.
We rate the claim that Schwab said a political revolution against the “Great Reset” is destroying his agenda False.
RELATED: Claim that Klaus Schwab’s daughter warned of climate lockdowns is from misinformation site
Para leer en español, vea esta traducción de Google Translate.
SciCheck Digest
The World Health Organization began using the term “Disease X” in a2018 planning document to refer to a “currently unknown” illness. But since the term was used at the January meeting of the World Economic Forum, conspiracy theorists baselessly claim Disease X is part of a “Globalist Plan to … Install World Government.”
Full Story
Disease X is the term the World Health Organization uses as a placeholder to represent an as-yet unknown new illness.
That’s like the term X factor, meaning an essential quality that is hard to define, or the use of X in mathematics, where the letter represents an unknown variable.
But online, conspiracy theorists and misinformation peddlers have twisted the term Disease X into something that is supposedly part of a sinister plot to wreak havoc on the world.
For example, Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist behind InfoWars, claimed in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that there is a “Globalist Plan to Launch #DiseaseX to Install World Government.”
And Donald Trump Jr. referred to a Jan. 17 panel held at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, when he wrote on Instagram, “I don’t trust the WEF clowns as far as I could throw them… They’re already talking about Disease X. Be prepared for whatever they throw you by checking out The Wellness Company, one of my triggered podcast’s newest sponsors!!!!”
Trump’s post asks “Why are they preparing for a hypothetical disease?” and encourages followers to purchase the Wellness Company’s “emergency medical kit.” The kit includes ivermectin and sells for $299.99 from his podcast sponsor, which we’ve written about before.
But posts that suggest or claim Disease X will be intentionally released in pursuit of world domination are unfounded.
As we said, the term is a placeholder that public health officials use to refer to potential future diseases, and the WEF panel Trump Jr. mentioned was focused on how governments and health systems can prepare for the next pandemic.
During the panel discussion in Davos earlier this month, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged the misinformation circulating on social media about Disease X. He explained, “we annually list the emerging diseases and MERS could be one, Zika, Ebola — those we know — but then we said, there are things that are unknown, that may happen and anything happening is a matter of when, not if, so we need to have a placeholder for that, for the diseases we don’t know that may come. And that was when we gave the name, ‘Disease X.’ So, ‘Disease X’ is a placeholder for unknown diseases.”
The WHO began using the term in 2018, Tedros said.
The organization’s February 2018 “annual review of diseases prioritized under the Research and Development Blueprint” listed eight types of priority diseases. The list included “Disease X,” which the document described as representing “the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease, and so the R&D Blueprint explicitly seeks to enable cross-cutting R&D preparedness that is also relevant for an unknown ‘Disease X’ as far as possible.”
So the term is nothing new. It has been used for six years.
Tedros acknowledged that discussing the possible emergence of a deadly, new pathogen “may create panic.” But, he said, “It’s better actually to anticipate something that may happen — because it has happened in our history many times — and prepare for it. We shouldn’t face things unprepared. We can prepare for some unknown things as well. Because there are basic things you can do.”
During the panel discussion, some of the suggestions for ways to prepare for the next Disease X were smoothing supply chains for vaccines, treatments and medical equipment; reinforcing epidemiological centers so there is better surveillance; and building health care systems that can expand when the need arises.
“Whatever the disease is, you should prepare for it,” Tedros said. “You don’t need to know the disease — there are common factors.”
Sources
Schumer, Peter. “X marks the unknown in algebra – but X’s origins are a math mystery.” The Conversation. 2 Aug 2023.
Social media users made an explosive claim that they have footage from Jeffrey Epstein’s first jail cell that implicates such public figures as former President Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey in his death.
But that footage is nowhere to be found.
A Jan. 20 Instagram post features a mugshot of Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender and financier, and an image of Ghislanie Maxwell, his convicted accomplice and former socialite. The post also shows a playback image of Epstein’s prison cell after his death.
The video’s caption says, “This jaw-dropping footage provides concrete evidence that Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Oprah, Rothschild and many more played a significant role in the incident, orchestrating it to protect their own interests!”
The caption adds that users can watch the unedited video on a Telegram channel titled “Jeffrey Epstein Expose” by clicking a link in the user’s bio. (Telegram is a messaging platform.)
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.)
The link in the user’s bio took us to a private Telegram channel with three subscribers called “Tucker Carlson VS Jeffrey Epstein: The INTERVIEW of the century.”
A search for the Telegram channel listed in the caption brought up an “Epstein exposed” channel, but contained no videos from Epstein’s jail cell.
A 2023 Justice Department report about Epstein’s imprisonment at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center found that he had died from suicide by hanging in August 2019. The autopsy confirmed that Epstein’s death could not have been a homicide because he had no defensive wounds to signal one.
The report also said Epstein was previously placed on suicide watch after he tried and failed to kill himselfin his prison cell on July 23, 2019.
The Instagram post claims that there’s video from “Epstein’s first jail cell, which mysteriously went missing,” but federal prosecutors said in 2020 that security footage from outside Epstein’s jail cell, where he had first tried suicide, was not saved and no longer exists.
And the Instagram post’s image is from New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner from Epstein’s cell after Epstein’s death on Aug. 10, 2019, and not an image of Epstein’s cell where he made his failed suicide attempt a month earlier.
In 2019, the New York Post reported that the Metropolitan Correctional Center does not have surveillance cameras inside of its cells.
The Justice Department’s investigation found that some prison security cameras malfunctioned during Epstein’s death, but one camera positioned at the stairway leading up to Epstein’s cell was functioning. That camera found no one entering Epstein’s cell tier from a common room before Epstein was found dead.
A resurfaced video of Epstein’s prison cell would surely have made headlines. But we used Google search and the Nexis news database and couldn’t find any news reports about a video from Epstein’s jail cell implicating prominent figures such as Winfrey and Clinton in Epstein’s death.
We rate the claim that video footage from Epstein’s first jail cell has resurfaced and implicates former President Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Oprah Winfrey and other public figures in his death Pants on Fire!
COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy benefits both mother and baby. Side effects are generally mild, and studies don’t show negative effects on the baby. A criticized study that gave COVID-19 vaccines to pregnant rats doesn’t show that vaccines cause autism or that people shouldn’t get COVID-19 vaccines, contrary to claims.
Full Story
COVID-19 vaccination protects pregnant people from severe COVID-19 and reduces COVID-19 risks for babies. As is the case in people who aren’t pregnant, side effects in pregnant people are usually mild and resolve within days. Studies do not show a link between COVID-19 vaccination and negative pregnancy outcomes or health problems for babies.
Long-standing claims that childhood vaccines cause autism have been roundly debunked. Long-term studies provide reassurance that vaccination during pregnancy against flu and other diseases does not increase a child’s risk of autism, a developmental disorder. And a recent study did not find a connection between maternal COVID-19 vaccination and increased risk of developmental delay at 18 months of age.
However, social media posts have misused findings from a recent study of COVID-19-vaccinated pregnant rats and their pups to back up unfounded claims that people should not take COVID-19 vaccines, or to promote unsubstantiated claims about vaccines and autism.
“I’m forever grateful I risked my reputation in my personal life to warn people far and wide to NOT get this experimental $h0t!” said one post sharing an article from the Epoch Times on the new study.
Commentator Candace Owens, who has a history of spreading misinformation, shared a post about the study on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, saying it supported long-standing, debunked claims about vaccines and autism. “That’s because vaccines and autism have always been linked, which affected mothers have been trying to tell the general public for decades,” she said. Posts about the study have continued to spread.
Researchers who study brain development expressed concerns to us about how the rat study was designed and interpreted.
The authors of the study, published Jan. 10 in Neurochemical Research, did behavioral and other tests on rats born to 15 female rats impregnated by five males. The pregnant rats either received an adult human-sized dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19 or a saline injection.
The researchers wrote that they observed “autism-like behaviors,” such as decreased interactions with an unfamiliar rat, and decreased neurons in regions of the brain in male rats born to vaccinated mothers. They also said they found alterations in the level of a particular protein in the brains of rats of both sexes born to vaccinated mothers.
Even if the results are taken at face value, it’s not possible to conclude from a study in rats that vaccines cause autism, because rat and human biology and behavior are different. Researchers do study rats to better understand autism, but these studies are meant to generate hypotheses, not change medical care.
Experts also told us there were various factors that made the study hard to interpret, such as the high vaccine dose given to the pregnant rats, despite their small size, the lack of replication of the experiment and issues with the statistical analyses.
“Caution should be exercised in generalizing these results to humans,” the authors themselves wrote in the paper. Corresponding author Mumin Alper Erdogan, a professor in the department of physiology at Izmir Katip Celebi University in Turkey, did not respond to a request for comment from us. However, he did answer questions from Health Feedback, responding to some criticisms and clarifying that there was “no intention, desire, or effort on our part to oppose vaccinations or make similar accusations.”
“Vaccines do not cause autism,” a spokesperson from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told us in an email. “To date, no vaccine safety monitoring data in the United States indicates a causal association between autism and COVID-19 vaccination.”
Rat Study Provides Limited Information
Multiple scientists expressed concerns to us about the high COVID-19 vaccine dose given to the pregnant rats.
Staci Bilbo, a neuroimmunologist at Duke University who studies how the immune system influences brain development, told us that vaccine doses are “extremely carefully” adjusted during vaccine development. Researchers determine the smallest dose that will generate the needed immune response.
Giving the rats — which on average weighed less than 8 ounces — a full adult human COVID-19 vaccine dose was equivalent to giving an average-weight American woman around 350 times the recommended dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, according to Bilbo’s calculation.
“If you give a high enough dose of anything it’s going to probably have impacts,” she said.
In response to questions about the dose, Erdogan told Health Feedback that “there’s no established standard for mRNA vaccine dosages in rats due to the lack of specific dose studies” and that relatively high doses have been used for studies of other animals of varying sizes.
Jeffrey S. Morris, director of the division of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, also told FactCheck.org that the high dose given to the rats was a limitation of the study. “This does not make the results irrelevant, since super high dose can potentially detect some potential issue that might manifest in some humans, but if I were reviewing this article I would make the authors emphasize the multiple of how much larger the effective dose in the animal study is to the current human dose, and include the qualifier that this is one reason why it is not clear whether these results are relevant to what is experienced by humans given the current doses.”
Christopher Coe, a psychoneuroimmunologist and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told us via email that were it his study, he would also have wanted to give the rats a low dose of the vaccine to see if results varied by dose. Coe has done studies on the effects of infection and maternal inflammation on the fetus during pregnancy.
Coe said it was important to take reports of drug or vaccine adverse events seriously, but he also listed numerous other concerns about the paper.
For example, he said the researchers did not provide information about the rats and their pregnancies that could have shed light on how the injections affected them — and whether or not this was likely to be relevant to humans. This missing information included, for instance, whether the rats had an inflammatory reaction to the injections — the hypothesized pathway for how vaccination during pregnancy might affect neurodevelopment.
Teresa Reyes, a professor of pharmacology and systems physiology at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, told us via email that information was missing on the length of the rat pregnancies. “If the pregnancy length was significantly different, it could indicate that the litters were born prematurely, which confounds the interpretation of the findings,” she said.
In humans, COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy has not been shown to increase preterm birth and may even protect against it.
She also said that information was missing on the weights of the pregnant rats, or dams, over time and their pups. “Significant differences in weight (e.g., vaccine exposed dams lost weight during the study) could indicate that the dams were severely ill in response to the vaccine, again confounding the interpretation of the study,” she said.
Coe said that he would have wanted “to replicate the findings rather than rush to publish on the basis of one experiment,” suggesting that both the authors of the paper and outside researchers should try to replicate the results.
And he expressed concern about the study’s statements that altered rat behaviors were “autism-like,” given that autism spectrum disorder is a “complex neurodevelopmental disorder.”
Brian Lee, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health who studies prenatal exposures and autism risk, told us via email that it is hard to diagnose autism in humans, let alone in rats. “It’s hard to read into some behavioral tests for a rat and imagine it translates 100% to an autism diagnosis in humans,” he said.
There also appeared to be issues with the study’s experimental design and statistical analysis.
For instance, studies of prenatal exposures need to account for something called “litter effects” — or the fact that the multiple offspring born in the same litter to the same animal mother might share characteristics.
“The authors did not describe any approach to address the potential for a litter confound which could skew the findings (e.g., one dam has a significantly different response, multiple pups are used from that litter, and this skews the findings),” Reyes said.
Additionally, the authors wrote that they set out to determine whether maternal vaccination led to “any sex-specific neurobehavioral changes” — or ways in which sex and vaccination, in combination, affected the rats’ behavior.
The authors didn’t find evidence of such sex-specific effects on social behavior, but they nevertheless went on to compare social behavioral results from the male pups of vaccinated mothers versus unvaccinated mothers and highlighted the results — something Reyes said they shouldn’t have done. “By improperly using statistics to analyze the data, the conclusions are not valid,” she said. “It is impossible to verify the stated claims because statistics were used incorrectly.”
Evidence Indicates Maternal Vaccination Is Effective, Safe
A person’s likelihood of being autistic is influenced by a combination of genetics and other factors. These likely include older parental age and whether there are complications at a child’s birth, including extreme prematurity or very low birth weight. As we’ve written previously, many lines of evidence contradict the idea — long spread by anti-vaccine groups — that childhood vaccines cause autism.
Some theoretical concerns about vaccines given during pregnancy and autism are based on research indicating that infections during pregnancy might slightly increase the risk of a child later developing autism. “We know that immune activation can impact the way the brain develops, and sometimes that’s in adverse ways and yet we also know that the immune system is important in just normal brain development,” Bilbo said.
But Bilbo said the body’s immune system reacts differently to a serious infection than it does to vaccination. A vaccine against a virus is designed to expose the body to just enough viral material to teach the immune system to recognize the infectious agent, should it encounter it later. “Dose matters, obviously,” Bilbo said. “It matters quite a bit.”
Studies in humans provide reassurance of recommended vaccines’ benefits and safety.
The Tdap vaccine — which protects against tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis, or whooping cough — is recommended during pregnancy to protect newborns until they are able to be vaccinated against pertussis themselves at two months of age. The CDC began to recommend the vaccine routinely in all pregnancies in 2012, based on an uptick in pertussis, which can lead to death in very young babies.
A 2018 study of children born in Kaiser Permanente Southern California hospitals between 2011 and 2014 found no increased risk of autism in those whose mothers had been vaccinated against Tdap during pregnancy.
Flu vaccines have long been recommended for pregnant people during flu season and reduce risks for both the mother and the baby. A 2020 Swedish study looking at vaccination against the 2009 pandemic swine flu found no link between vaccination during pregnancy and increased autism risk.
A 2017 study, looking at children born in the Kaiser Permanente Northern California health system between 2000 and 2010, found no association overall between autism and flu vaccination during pregnancy. The researchers did find a “suggestion” of increased autism risk when mothers were vaccinated during the first trimester of pregnancy but said that statistical analyses indicated the “finding could be due to chance.”
Photo by Cultura Creative / stock.adobe.com
In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, research has not indicated any negative impacts on pregnancy outcomes or on babies of vaccinated mothers. In fact, there’s some evidence maternal vaccination is protective against certain bad pregnancy outcomes, such as preterm birth and stillbirth.
A study published on Jan. 22 in JAMA Pediatrics followed around 4,200 children born to mothers who enrolled in the study between May 2020 and August 2021. At 18 months, scores on a developmental screening test did not differ between children whose mothers got COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy versus those whose mothers didn’t.
The authors wrote that “these data suggest that maternal vaccination against COVID-19 during pregnancy was safe from the perspective of offspring neurodevelopment through 18 months of age.”
“It’s small and just 1 study, and of course more study is needed, but the findings are reassuring,” said Drexel’s Lee, who was not involved in the new study.
Coe emphasized the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy. “There are now many clinical studies that have demonstrated the benefits for safer pregnancy outcomes (as compared to the risk of an actual infection), as well as the reduced risk for young infants of getting a respiratory infection during the first 6 months of life,” he said.
“There is no known link between COVID-19 vaccines and the occurrence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD),” a Pfizer spokesperson told us in an email. “With hundreds of millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines from BioNTech and Pfizer administered globally, the benefit-risk profile of our vaccines remains positive for all authorized indications/uses and age groups.”
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.
Sources
“COVID-19 Vaccines While Pregnant or Breastfeeding.” CDC website. Updated 3 Nov 2023.
“Getting Your COVID-19 Vaccine.” CDC website. Updated 23 Jan 2024.
Male, Victoria. “COVID-19 vaccine safety in pregancy – table of studies.” Google Docs. Updated 8 Dec 2023.
Yandell, Kate. “What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong About Autism.” FactCheck.org. 10 Aug 2023.
“Autism and Vaccines.” CDC website. Updated 1 Dec 2021.
Plotkin, S. et al. “Vaccines and Autism: A Tale of Shifting Hypotheses.” Clinical Infectious Diseases. Updated 15 Feb 2009.
Zerbo, Ousseny et al. “Association Between Influenza Infection and Vaccination During Pregnancy and Risk of Autism Spectrum Disorder.” JAMA Pediatrics. 2 Jan 2017.
Ludvigsson, Jonas F. et al. “Maternal Influenza A(H1N1) Immunization During Pregnancy and Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder in Offspring: A Cohort Study.” Annals of Internal Medicine. 1 Sep 2020.
Becerra-Culqui, Tracy A. et al. “Prenatal Tetanus, Diphtheria, Acellular Pertussis Vaccination and Autism Spectrum Disorder.” Pediatrics. Sep 2018.
“Autism Spectrum Disorder.” National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Updated 19 Dec 2023.
Jaswa, Eleni G. et al. “In Utero Exposure to Maternal COVID-19 Vaccination and Offspring Neurodevelopment at 12 and 18 Months.” JAMA Pediatrics. 22 Jan 2024.
Erdogan, Mumin Alper et al. “Prenatal Exposure to COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 Induces Autism-Like Behaviors in Male Neonatal Rats: Insights into WNT and BDNF Signaling Perturbations.” Neurochemical Research. 10 Jan 2024.
Jackie | bootleg media (@bootlegmedia__). “How does Anthony fauci sleep at night …” Instagram. 13 Jan 2024.
Athrappully, Naveen. “COVID-19 Shots Linked to Autism in Vaccinated Rats: Study.” Epoch Times. 13 Jan 2024.
Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO). “That’s because vaccines and autism have always been linked, which affected mothers have been trying to tell the general public for decades. …” X. 13 Jan 2024.
HealthFreedomFlorida (@healthfreedomflorida). “[no text].” Instagram. 13 Jan 2024.
Ward, John. “Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to recommend the jab to pregnant women. …” Facebook. 19 Jan 2024.
shanna scrunchy mama | organic humor | holistic. “I wonder what they will find out next about this shot …” Instagram. 19 Jan 2024.
Nic* Former* Democrat turned outspoken critic. “You alter your kids’ DNA w/ totally unnecessary & experimental meds …” Instagram. 21 Jan 2024.
Unjected. “We are the the true remaining ‘Control-Group’ …” Instagram. 23 Jan 2024.
Cops4Freedom. “[no text].” Instagram. 23 Jan 2024.
Sohn, Emily. “How Rats Could Lead to Autism Drugs That Actually Work.” The Atlantic. 16 Mar 2017.
“Rat Study Alleged to Link COVID-19 Vaccines to Autism Cannot Be Generalized to Humans and Contains Important Limitations.” Health Feedback. 18 Jan 2024.
CDC spokesperson. Email to FactCheck.org. 22 Jan 2024.
Bilbo, Staci. Interview with FactCheck.org. 18 Jan 2024.
Morris, Jeffrey S. Email to FactCheck.org. 25 Jan 2024.
Coe, Christopher. Email with FactCheck.org. 18 Jan 2024.
Reyes, Teresa. Email with FactCheck.org. 24 Jan 2024.
Lee, Brian K. Emails with FactCheck.org. 18 and 23 Jan 2024.
“What is Autism Spectrum Disorder?” CDC website. Updated 9 Dec 2022.
“Autism.” National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. 19 Apr 2023.
Choi, Charles Q. “The Link between Maternal Infection and Autism, Explained.” Spectrum. 13 Dec 2022.
“Tdap (Pertussis) Vaccine and Pregnancy.” CDC website. Updated 10 Aug 2017.
“Updated Recommendations for Use of Tetanus Toxoid, Reduced Diphtheria Toxoid, and Acellular Pertussis Vaccine (Tdap) in Pregnant Women — Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), 2012.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 22 Feb 2013.
Mackin, David William and Walker, Susan P. “The Historical Aspects of Vaccination in Pregnancy.” Best Practice & Research Clinical Obstetrics & Gynaecology. 13 Oct 2020.
“Influenza (Flu) Vaccine and Pregnancy.” CDC website. 12 Dec 2019.
Pfizer spokesperson. Email to FactCheck.org. 23 Jan 2024.
If you’re a woman with a thyroid condition, could getting vaccinated against COVID-19 make it worse?
That’s the claim in a Jan. 17 Instagram reel featuring a physical therapist who sells supplements and says the vaccine could exacerbate autoimmune or thyroid problems in people, especially women. The reel includes screenshots of scientific articles with headlines about whether there is a link between the vaccine and thyroid troubles.
Text over the video reads: “Did the vaccine make your thyroid worse?”
The short answer: The science is inconclusive about whether there’s a link between COVID-19 vaccines and worsening thyroid and autoimmune disorders. Experts told PolitiFact that no cause-and-effect relationship has been established between the two.
Here’s what recent case studies have found:
A 2022 case review study, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Endocrinological Investigation, found that among 83 reported cases of thyroid disorder following COVID-19 vaccination, 68% were after vaccination with mRNA-based vaccines.
“SARS-CoV-2 vaccines have been associated with very rare complications, such as thyroid disorders,” according to the article. It also said that the vaccines’ benefits “exceed any risk of infrequent complications such as a transient thyroid malfunction.”
One 2023 review examined the case of a 50-year-old woman with no prior history of autoimmune or thyroid issues and no other health issues who reported developing a thyroid disorder after receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Blood tests confirmed the thyroid condition. “The vaccine’s mechanism of causing hypothyroidism is still being studied, but vaccines continue to improve, and the benefits outweigh the side effects,” the study said.
A separate 2023 case review said, “The causal relationship between COVID-19 vaccines and these autoimmune diseases remains to be demonstrated.”
“There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines cause thyroid disease,” Dr. Robert H. Hopkins Jr., medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, said in an email statement to PolitiFact.
Hopkins noted that millions of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered around the world, and serious adverse events are rare.
“There have been rare reports of thyroid conditions occurring after COVID-19 vaccination in the medical literature. … These cases were identified anywhere from a few days to several weeks after vaccination and represented many different thyroid conditions,” he said.
According to the American Thyroid Association, “There is no evidence at this time that having thyroid disease makes you at higher risk for vaccine-related problems.”
Dr. Michael McDermott, president of the American Thyroid Association and director of the University of Colorado Hospital’s endocrinology and diabetes practice, said in an email case reviews are “are good for bringing potential issues to the forefront of discussion (hypothesis generating) but scientifically are nowhere near adequate to establish cause and effect.”
He said much remains to be studied about how the COVID-19 virus and the vaccines affect thyroid disorders, McDermott said.
“Thyroid specialists are not yet able to determine the long-term consequences of COVID-19 infection. … The medical/scientific community needs to evaluate each new issue as it appears and thyroid dysfunction (temporary or permanent) is no exception.”
By early 2020, COVID-19 was sweeping through the United States and began wreaking havoc on the daily lives of millions of Americans.
Confusion over voting and the polls swirled around the April 7, 2020, election. On the ballot was the presidential primary and elections for state Supreme Court, Milwaukee mayor, Milwaukee County executive and other local offices.
With regular polling places drastically reduced in many cities, many voters cast their ballots by alternative means, with county officials in Dane and Milwaukee offering guidance to voters, specifically on what they needed to do to get an absentee ballot.
“Unfortunately during COVID, the clerks in Madison and Milwaukee told their constituents that they were actually indefinitely confined and did not have to come and vote, which was incorrect,” state Rep. Cindi Duchow, R-Town of Delafield, said Nov. 9, 2023, during an Assembly floor session in which she spoke in favor of Assembly Bill 494.
One of the provisions of A.B. 494, introduced Oct. 16, 2023, by Duchow and other lawmakers, states that a voter seeking indefinitely confined status must apply for that status on an application prescribed by the Elections Commission. Also under the bill, an outbreak or epidemic of a communicable disease in a voter’s community does not qualify the voter as indefinitely confined.
So, did the clerks in Dane and Milwaukee Counties tell their constituents that they were actually indefinitely confined and did not have to come and vote and was the advice from the clerks off-base on what voters needed to do to obtain an absentee ballot?
Let’s take a look.
The Supreme Court ruling
When asked for backup for the claim, Duchow, in an email to PolitiFact Wisconsin, said AB 494 is designed to “ensure that voters clearly understand when they can declare themselves ‘indefinitely confined,’ and do not rely on election misinformation from left-wing clerks.”
Duchow said in preparing the measure, she reviewed several sources, including the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision in Republican Party of Wisconsin v. Dane County.
As reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the court on March 31, 2020, blocked Dane County’s clerk from telling voters they could request absentee ballots without showing a photo ID because of the coronavirus pandemic.
According to ruling, Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, on March 25, 2020, posted the following guidance to voters on his Facebook page:
“I have informed Dane County Municipal Clerks that during this emergency and based on the Governors Stay at Home order I am declaring all Dane County voters may indicate as needed that they are indefinitely confined due to illness. This declaration will make it easier for Dane County voters to participate in this election by mail in these difficult times. I urge all voters who request a ballot and have trouble presenting a valid ID to indicate that they are indefinitely confined.
“A voter can select a box that reads ‘I certify that I am indefinitely confined due to age, illness, infirmity or disability and request ballots be sent to me for every election until I am no longer confined or fail to return a ballot.’ The voter is then able to skip the step of uploading an ID in order to receive a ballot for the April 7 election.”
The Milwaukee County Clerk, George Christenson, issued a nearly identical declaration on Facebook later that same day, the high court ruling said.
The Milwaukee County Clerk “urged all voters who request a ballot and do not have the ability or equipment to upload a valid ID to indicate that they are indefinitely confined,” the Supreme Court ruling said.
McDonell, the Journal Sentinel reported, said he was not trying to circumvent the voter ID law, but wanted to alert voters that those who are confined can get absentee ballots without an ID.
Christenson, as the Journal Sentinel reported, wrote in a letter that he had informed the county’s municipal clerks that this is an appropriate course of action during Gov. Tony Evers’ stay-at-home order and the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s guidance.
The Journal Sentinel reported that the justices ruled all voters could not be considered confined just because Evers ordered people to stay at home except when they are conducting essential business
“McDonell appeared to assert that all voters are automatically, indefinitely confined solely due to the emergency and the Safer at Home Order and that voters could therefore declare themselves to be indefinitely confined when requesting an absentee ballot, which would allow them to skip the step of presenting or uploading a valid proof of identification,” the justices wrote.
What the clerks say
In Dane County, McDonell, in an email, acknowledged the court action.
“The state supreme court affirmed in 2020 that under state law individual voters, not clerks or lawmakers, determine whether they are indefinitely confined due to illness or age,” McDonell said. “During the pandemic, many voters around the state temporarily determined they were indefinitely confined due to the COVID virus. Nothing has changed and that is still the law today.”
In Milwaukee County, Christenson said Duchow’s statement “isn’t accurate” and pointed to an updated statement his office issued following clarified guidance issued by the Wisconsin Election Commission on March 27, 2020.
That guidance said, partly, that voters must decide for themselves whether they qualify for the ‘indefinitely confined’ photo identification exception based upon their current circumstances. Also, according to the WEC guidance, “indefinitely confined status shall not be used by electors simply as a means to avoid the photo identification requirement.”
Christenson said his office followed the science around COVID-19 and adhered to the law.
“This measure not only aligned with public health considerations at the time, but also ensured the preservation of the fundamental right to vote for all eligible individuals. We followed the science, we followed the law, and I would make the same decision today.”
The court ruling, in fact, says the clerk guidance on how to obtain an absentee ballot was “erroneous”:
“Accordingly, we conclude that the Respondents’ interpretation of Wisconsin election laws was erroneous. Additionally, we conclude that Emergency Order (No.) 12 did not render all Wisconsin electors ‘indefinitely confined,’ thereby obviating the requirement of a valid photo identification to obtain an absentee ballot.”
Legal expert weighs in
Rick Esenberg, president and general counsel for Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a nonprofit conservative law firm, pointed out in an email to PolitiFact Wisconsin that the clerks’ initial guidance said people were confined because of the pandemic, and the Milwaukee clerk added an additional statement that “urged all voters who request a ballot and do not have the ability or equipment to upload a valid ID to indicate that they are indefinitely confined.”
Esenberg said the clarified guidance issued by the Wisconsin Elections Commission didn’t address the COVID-19 issue directly but said an elector couldn’t claim indefinitely confined status to avoid uploading a photo ID to obtain a ballot.
After oral arguments, Esenberg said, the Supreme Court enjoined the clerks from giving advice contrary to the commission’s guidelines.
“After the election, it reached the issue on the merits and said the clerks were wrong, WEC was right and that a voter couldn’t claim to be indefinitely confined because of the condition of another, i.e., couldn’t claim to be confined because others were sick and he or she was afraid of becoming infected,” Esenberg said. “In its view, the statutory language just doesn’t say that. It did say, however, that whether someone was indefinitely confined was a determination to be made by the voter.”
So, the clerks were wrong according to the court, Esenberg explained, but there is a major caveat to Duchow’s statement.
“The issue wasn’t really ‘coming to vote’ if, by that, we mean voting in person. It was what you have to do to get an absentee ballot,” Esenberg said.
Our ruling
Duchow said, “Unfortunately during COVID, the clerks in Madison and Milwaukee told their constituents that they were actually indefinitely confined and did not have to come and vote, which was incorrect.”
Although it’s true that clerks in Dane and Milwaukee Counties offered incorrect guidance to voters, Duchow’s claim mischaracterizes what the clerks’ posts said with the phrase “did not have to come and vote.”
According to the Supreme Court ruling, the clerks’ guidance did not refer to not coming in to vote.
Rather, the clerks were offering advice to voters on indicating, as needed, that they are indefinitely confined because of illness when requesting an absentee ballot, which would allow them to skip the step of presenting or uploading a valid proof of identification, as the Supreme Court justices noted.
When a statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information, the rating is Mostly True, and that fits here.
After health care workers at a Denver hospital received an Ebola vaccine in November, social media users spread a baseless claim that vaccine shedding puts other people at risk of catching the often-fatal disease.
“US Hospitals Caught Injecting Experimental Ebola Vaccine That Sheds!” read the caption on a Jan. 22 Instagram post. “Colorado is conducting an experimental Ebola vaccine program which has been found to shed 31% of the time.”
The post shared an excerpt from a longer interview with Dr. Richard Bartlett on Alex Jones’ InfoWars show, which is known for sharing conspiracy theories and misinformation. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Bartlett pushed the unproven theory that budesonide, a steroid in asthma inhalers, can cure COVID-19.
In the full interview that Jones shared on X, Bartlett and Jones discussed the news about Denver health care workers being among the first in the U.S. to receive an Ebola vaccine to prepare for a potential future Ebola outbreak.
Bartlett said people receiving the Ebola vaccine can expose people to the live Ebola virus. In the longer interview, Bartlett said the vaccine sheds 31% of the time, meaning in those instances, the Ebola virus could be transmitted to someone else.
The Instagram post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
The Ebola vaccine is neither experimental, nor sheds Ebola virus, health authorities told PolitiFact. And despite other claims in the video, there’s no threat of an Ebola outbreak from a planned bat research center at Colorado State University, where scientists will research how bats respond to infectious diseases.
The lab will not be handling dangerous pathogens such as Ebola, the school’s website said.
What is Ebola?
Ebola is an often-fatal virus that causes severe inflammation and tissue damage throughout the body.
Of four species of Ebola viruses that can infect humans, Ebola virus species Zaire ebolavirus is the deadliest, with fatality rates of 70% to 90% if left untreated, the CDC said.
That strain is responsible for most recorded Ebola disease outbreaks.
The virus is spread through direct contact with blood and bodily fluids of an infected person or by touching items contaminated with those fluids.
The Ebola vaccine
Merck makes Ervebo, which is the first Ebola vaccine approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
In 2019, the vaccine was approved in the U.S. for use in people ages 18 and older. In July 2023, approval was expanded for children 1 year and older.
The European Medicines Agency in 2019 conditionally approved Ervebo for adults and gave full authorization in 2021. It expanded the vaccine’s use to children in September 2023.
The vaccine is also approved in the United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland and 10 countries in Africa. It protects only against Zaire ebolavirus, not the other strains that can infect humans.
The Ervebo vaccine does not contain the Ebola virus. Instead, it uses a different type of virus, vesicular stomatitis, that has been weakened and modified to contain a protein from the Zaire ebolavirus.
Can you catch Ebola from vaccine shedding?
Health authorities told PolitiFact it’s impossible to catch Ebola from vaccine shedding because the vaccine does not contain the Ebola virus. The vesicular stomatitis virus that the vaccine is made with can shed — one study showed that it shed in 31% of children, peaking at about a week after vaccination — but that can’t cause Ebola, authorities said.
The vesicular stomatitis virus “has little to no effect on humans,” said Anna-Sofia Joro, a European Medicines Agency spokesperson.
The vesicular stomatitis virus has been detected in blood, saliva, urine and fluid from blisters of vaccinated people. The package insert for Ervebo said shedding has been detected for up to 14 days after vaccination. The duration of shedding is unknown, but samples taken 28 days after vaccination tested negative, the insert said.
“Vaccination with Ervebo cannot cause Ebola because there is no risk of shedding Ebola virus,” said David Daigle, a CDC spokesperson.
The FDA also said in a statement to PolitiFact that it’s “not possible to get Ebola infection from shed vaccine virus.”
Is there a connection to a bat lab?
In the clip shared on Instagram, Bartlett suggested a connection between the vaccines and the bat research center at Colorado State University.
We found numerous social media posts baselessly connecting the Ebola vaccines given in Denver and the bat research center.
In 2021, Colorado State University received a $6.7 million grant from the National Institutes for Health to expand its existing bat research program.
Researchers at the school have studied bats for 15 years and infectious diseases for six decades. The new lab will study only low-risk pathogens, “comparable to organisms that cause food-borne illness or strep throat,” the school said.
Why did Denver health care workers get the Ebola vaccine?
The Ebola vaccine is not commercially available in the U.S. Daigle said the only people authorized to receive it in the U.S. fall into three occupational categories: responders to an Ebola outbreak; lab staff at certain facilities that may handle Ebola specimens; and health care workers at designated Special Pathogen Treatment Centers, involved in treating or transporting Ebola patients.
The Denver health care workers who received the vaccine are in the third category.
After a 2014 Ebola outbreak that reached the U.S., Denver Health created a high-risk infection team of nurses, doctors, paramedics and other workers to prepare to handle outbreaks of special pathogens.
Denver Health said in a statement to PolitiFact that nine of its employees on the high-risk infection team received the Ebola vaccine. None reported any significant side effects, and there are no plans to further vaccinate Denver Health staff, it said.
Our ruling
An Instagram post claimed that U.S. hospitals were caught injecting an experimental Ebola vaccine that sheds.
The Ebola vaccine is not experimental; it’s been FDA-approved for use in the U.S. since 2019. The vaccine does not shed the Ebola virus because it doesn’t contain the Ebola virus. It’s made with a different virus, vesicular stomatitis, that has been weakened and modified to contain a protein from the Zaire ebolavirus.
Vesicular stomatitis virus can shed, but it’s harmless, officials said.
All eyes are on Republican front-runner and former President Donald Trump as the 2024 election nears and he fights several legal battles. Ahead of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary Jan. 23, some social media users argued that the judge in Trump’s New York-based defamation trial was engaging in “election interference.”
“ELECTION INTERFERENCE ALERT: The judge in E. Jean Carroll defamation trial just delayed todays trial until tomorrow — the day of the NH primary,” read one Jan. 22 Instagram 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.)
Trump’s defamation damages trial was delayed because of a juror’s illness and COVID-19 exposures in the courtroom, not to interfere with the New Hampshire primary. The trial resumed Jan. 25, two days after the primary.
E. Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuits against Trump
The trial is the culmination of writer E. Jean Carroll’s second civil lawsuit against Trump, whom she says assaulted her in a department store dressing room in 1996 and then publicly defamed her by claiming she was dishonest about the incident.
In May 2023, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll decades earlier — and for defaming her when he denied her allegations and said she was lying in an October 2022 Truth Social post. That jury awarded Carroll about $5 million — a little more than $2 million for the sexual abuse and about $3 million in damages for the defamation, The New York Times reported. Trump is appealing the decision.
But in a September summary judgment, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan — who also oversaw the 2023 trial — ruled that the jury’s May verdict proved that previous 2019 comments Trump made alleging that Carroll was lying were false. As a result, the current jury is being asked to decide what additional damages, if any, Trump should pay Carroll for defaming her in 2019 while he was president.
The trial began Jan. 16. Trump has attended sporadically, bouncing between the courtroom, his mother-in-law’s funeral and campaign appearances.
Initially, it was possible Trump would take the stand Jan. 22 in his own defense, but an unexpected delay shifted the trial timeline and sparked misleading online claims.
Trial delayed because of illness, not “election interference”
On Jan. 22, a juror’s illness forced a delay of Trump’s expected testimony, according to news reports. It was unclear when the trial would resume, as the court awaited the results of COVID-19 tests for all the jurors, The Associated Press reported.
That same day, Trump’s lead attorney, Alina Habba, reported a recent COVID-19 exposure, after which she ran a fever. Although she and her law partner tested negative for COVID-19 that morning, Habba said Jan. 22 that she didn’t have a problem “with a short delay for a day” so everyone could get tested.
Habba asked that the trial, and therefore Trump’s testimony, be delayed until Wednesday because of the New Hampshire primary. Judge Kaplan did not rule immediately, telling her, “Circumstances may result in you getting what you ask for, and maybe not,” The Associated Press reported.
A Jan. 22 court docket entry said the trial would be delayed until after the New Hampshire primary, but it did not specify a reason for the delay.
“Trial day ended early and trial continued to Wednesday, 1/24/2024 @ 9:30 AM,” read the docket entry. “Trial will not be held on Tuesday, 1/23/2024.”
Then, on New Hampshire’s primary day, Jan. 23, the docket was updated again to say the trial would not be held Jan. 24.
Republican presidential front-runner and former President Donald Trump speaks Jan. 23, 2024, at a primary election night party in Nashua, N.H. (AP)
Trump won the primary and gave a victory speech in New Hampshire that evening. We found no evidence that the trial delay was an attempt to interfere with the primary, nor that the delay kept Trump from New Hampshire on Election Day.
The trial resumed Jan. 25, with Trump expected to take the stand.
Our ruling
An Instagram post claimed that the judge in Trump’s defamation trial engaged in “election interference” by delaying the trial to Jan. 23, New Hampshire’s primary day.
On Jan. 22, a juror’s illness and a separate COVID-19 exposure caused a trial delay. The trial resumed Jan. 25, two days after the New Hampshire primary. Trump’s lawyer did not oppose the delay, and we found nothing to suggest the delay was meant to interfere with the primary.
We rate these claims False.
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
RELATED:After New Hampshire primary win, Donald Trump misleads on Democrats voting, immigration, border wall
With ominous music playing in the background, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson presented his latest minidocumentary titled “The Invasion.” In it, Carlson warns about massive demographic changes in the United States that he says are orchestrated by politicians. As he narrates, images of migrants sleeping on sidewalks and in public facilities such as airports and police stations across the U.S. scroll past.
Carlson paints a gloomy picture and makes several claims, including that, “In August 2023, illegal immigration outpaced American births.” The claim is included in an excerpt from a video that was shared Jan. 17 on Facebook.
“It is ending: the country you grew up in no longer exists. Soon it would be unrecognizable,” Carlson says. “Americans are being replaced. That is not a conspiracy theory, it is a fact.”
It is a nod to the “great replacement theory,” a debunked conspiracy theory that claims Democrats and other people in power are replacing white people of European descent with nonwhite immigrants. The theory has been referenced by some mass shooters in the U.S. and abroad.
The Carlson video focuses on Chicago, which has struggled to house arriving migrants. Carlson said U.S. cities “are hellish and immigration is the reason.”
The Facebook video 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.)
PolitiFact asked the Tucker Carlson Network for evidence for this claim but did not receive a response.
In the Facebook video, Carlson refers to a chart around the one-minute mark that shows U.S. births versus migrants illegally entering the U.S. under both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. The chart is attributed to an X account with username @fentasyl that identifies itself by the name “datahazard.” The version that Carlson shows does not include precise numbers of births or migrants, or months of the year. The X account has shared multiple versions of the chart, one time correcting itself about which month migrant encounters supposedly outpaced births.
A modified version of the same graph was reshared Dec. 29 by Elon Musk, CEO of X, who said he was reposting it “to give you a sense of the immense and growing size of illegal immigration!”
To check this claim, we compared nationwide August birth data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with August immigration data from Customs and Border Protection.
According to provisional 2023 data from the CDC, there were 322,000 births in August. The same month, federal agencies said there were 304,073 migrant encounters nationwide.
But encounters represent events and not people and are not a reliable way to determine how many people have crossed the border illegally. The same people can be counted more than once if they have tried to cross the border multiple times. Therefore, it’s not accurate to say that 304,073 migrants illegally entered the U.S. in August.
It is also impossible to accurately measure the number of people who have illegally crossed the U.S. border because border authorities don’t stop everyone.
The claim also fails to account for the 82,657 encounters that ended with people being removed or returned to their home countries, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP.
U.S. August births were 322,000, and although federal immigration authorities counted 304,073 encounters with migrants entering the U.S. illegally that month, that number includes events and not people.
We rate the claim that “in August 2023, illegal immigration outpaced American births” False.
PolitiFact Staff Writer Maria Ramirez Uribe contributed to this report.
The headline and story sounded shocking: A leading Democratic donor’s son issued a death threat against former President Donald Trump.
The allegation, however, came not from law enforcement or federal prosecutors. Instead, the proof The Gateway Pundit cited was a single X post from Open Society Foundation chair Alex Soros, son of billionaire philanthropist George Soros, a favorite target of far-right conspiracy theories.
“Last year, the crime and inflation crises largely evaporated,” Alex Soros wrote Jan. 21 on X. “So did the leading theories about what had caused them.”
His post linked to a Jan. 19 story in The Atlantic by staff writer Rogé Karma titled, “The Great Normalization,” about the simultaneous drop in violent crime and inflation in 2023, despite dire predictions that each was on an unprecedented rise.
Neither the story nor Alex Soros’ post mentioned a threat of violence against Trump. But The Gateway Pundit — and some Trump supporters, including conservative activist Laura Loomer and Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser — focused on two images that appeared automatically in the story’s preview: a bullet hole in glass and a hand holding dollar bills.
“Alex Soros Tweets Out Bullet Hole and 47 — A Direct Violent Threat to Donald Trump!” Gateway Pundit’s headline read; the story quoted an anonymously posted 47-word blog post from a website called both “The Conservative Treehouse” and “The Last Refuge” that read:
“Alex Soros, the son of George Soros, sends a message via his Twitter account that is troubling. Being subtle like a brick through a window the billionaire leftist posts a picture of a ‘Bullet Hole’ and ‘$47.’ President Donald Trump is going to be the 47th President.”
There is no evidence Soros’ X post is a veiled threat against Trump.
The pictures in the article are stock images from Getty Images — images that a Google reverse-image search showed have been used with countless articles over the years, including in Bloomberg News, Barron’s, CBS, Marketplace and The Hill.
Anna Bross, a spokesperson for The Atlantic, said the magazine’s “art department created an illustration from two stock photographs to accompany a story about the rates of crime and inflation.”
She said the claim that the stock images contain a coded threat against Trump is “absurd and irresponsible.” Soros, she said, had no role in selecting the article’s images.
The Gateway Pundit did not answer PolitiFact’s request for comment.
(Screenshot of Gateway Pundit article)
Loomer’s X post criticizing the image described it as “a call for assassination embedded in the pictures, pointing to the $47 sum of the cash pictured and asserting “there’s messaging conveyed through the arrangement of the money.”
Misinformation expert Darren Linvill, co-director of the Watt Family Innovation Center Media Forensics Hub, likened the claim to QAnon conspiracy theorists’ efforts to draw hidden meaning from Trump’s actions and other unrelated events. (Loomer has promoted QAnon claims.)
In its stock image caption, Getty describes the cash image simply as “hand holding out money,” and dates its origin to “circa 1950s.” An Open Society Foundations spokesperson said in an emailed statement that Soros’ post was not a threat: “Alex was sharing the positive news that crime and inflation are trending downward — developments that should be celebrated by all Americans. Nothing less, nothing more.”
Alex Soros was named Open Society’s chair in 2023. His father is a regular target of conspiracy theories that PolitiFact has repeatedly reported on and debunked. George Soros, born in Hungary in 1930, is an American citizen and Holocaust survivor who advocates for liberal social causes and frequently donates to Democratic politicians. Linvill said Soros’ “extreme wealth, ethnic and cultural background, as well as his interest and support of politically salient issues” make him a popular target.
We rate the claim that Alex Soros sent a violent death threat to Trump through an X post Pants on Fire!
