Tag: General News

As fentanyl deaths have skyrocketed over the past few years, U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher is pointing to China for supplying the deadly drug to the United States.

Gallagher, R-Wis., is chairman of the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which has given him a national platform on China-related issues. 

In a recent appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show,” he said: 

“Beating the Chinese as they attempt to do a variety of things — undermine our sovereignty, send fentanyl into America killing 80,000 Americans a year, threaten war in the Pacific by threatening to take Taiwan — that to me is the biggest national security issue.” 

Here, we’ll fact-check China’s role in getting fentanyl into the U.S. and how many people the drug is killing.

The claim is numerically accurate on fentanyl overdoses but misrepresents China’s role in illicit fentanyl trafficking into the U.S.

Let’s take a look.

Fentanyl deaths are on the rise in the US

When asked for backup, Jordan Dunn, Gallagher’s communications director, pointed us to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s final and provisional data on drug overdoses, saying Gallagher’s 80,000 figure gave a general estimate of the overdose numbers.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that the CDC describes as “50 to 100 times more potent than morphine.” Illegally manufactured versions of the drug have skyrocketed the U.S.’s opioid overdose crisis in the last decade, according to the CDC’s information webpage on fentanyl.

Gallagher’s estimate is close to fentanyl overdose numbers. 

According to the CDC, provisional numbers for overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, hit 77,415 between April 2022 and April 2023. 

In the latest year for finalized CDC data, 70,601 people died in 2021 from overdoses involving synthetic opioids. Fentanyl compromises about 90% of the deaths in that category.

Illicit fentanyl is primarily coming into the US from Mexico cartels 

Regarding the other part of Gallagher’s claim, that China “sends fentanyl into America,” experts say this is a misleading interpretation of the trafficking of fentanyl into the U.S.

Chinese drug producers are primarily creating the chemicals to make fentanyl and sending it to Mexican cartels, not directly to the U.S., said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institute think tank.

Early in the U.S. opioid epidemic, China was the primary source of illicit fentanyl but when the Chinese government banned the production of fentanyl in 2019, Felbab-Brown said producers switched to selling chemicals used in the production of fentanyl.

This created a more roundabout way of getting fentanyl into the U.S.

Other reports have reached similar conclusions: 

According to a 2022 report from the Congressional Research Service, Chinese traffickers no longer send fentanyl directly to the U.S., instead, chemists send the materials to Mexican criminal organizations who then produce the fentanyl.

And according to the 2023 US International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, Mexico is now “the source of the vast majority” of illicit fentanyl seized in the U.S.

Our ruling

Gallagher said China sends “fentanyl into America killing 80,000 Americans a year.”

Fentanyl deaths in the U.S. have spiked in recent years, with over 70,601 overdoses from synthetic opioids like fentanyl occurring in 2021 and an estimated 77,415 occurring in 2022, roughly matching Gallagher’s estimate.

But as far as China’s role in supplying fentanyl to the U.S., Gallagher misses the mark. While China used to be the primary source of illicit fentanyl directly to the U.S., finished products primarily come from Mexico which produces the drug using chemicals from China.

We rate this statement Half True. 

 

 

Did the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention falsify data about COVID-19 deaths to encourage Americans to get vaccinated against the disease? 

That’s what a recent headline claims: “CDC admits it faked 99% of COVID deaths to scare public into taking vaccine.”   

An Instagram post sharing it 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 blog post that published the headline Aug. 31 goes on to say that “newly released data from the CDC reveals that most recorded fatalities that were blanket-blamed on COVID were caused by something else.”

The post’s logic appears to be that because the CDC reported that “just 1.7% of the 324 ‘COVID deaths’ registered in the week ending Aug. 19 had COVID as the primary cause of death,” then “only a fraction of the claimed number of American lives are being lost directly to the virus each week.” The post purported that CDC data showed “99 percent of ‘Covid deaths’ have been faked.”

The post followed an Aug. 28 Daily Mail story that bore the headline: “99% of ‘COVID deaths’ not primarily caused by the virus, CDC data shows.” 

That headline has since been updated to say: “Covid to blame for just 1% of weekly deaths from all causes across the US, CDC data shows.”

“An earlier version of this article claimed 99% of COVID deaths in the past week were not primarily caused by the virus,” a correction appended to the bottom of the article says. “In fact, a footnote at the bottom of the CDC’s COVID data tracker explains the percentage of all reported deaths attributed as COVID-19 is calculated based on the number of deaths from all causes.”

For the week ended Sept. 23, 2.7% of deaths in the United States were caused by COVID-19, the CDC’s data shows.

We rate claims that the CDC admitted it faked data to scare the public into getting COVID-19 vaccines False.

 

Was President Joe Biden’s latest gaffe revealing himself as responsible for the summer wildfires in Maui, Hawaii? 

A recent Facebook post claims as much, captioning a 40-minute video with this clickbait headline: “Joe Biden MISTAKENLY admits shady role in Maui fires.” 

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.)

Anyone who watched the post’s video may have been disappointed. Far from a smoking gun, the footage is a montage of TV broadcasts about the wildfires, including commentary critical of the president’s response. 

But no “shady role” was exposed. 

We rate claims this video shows Biden accidentally admitting to a role in the fires False.

 

A video featuring ominous images of oversized viruses and people in medical masks warns that a pandemic more devastating than the one caused by COVID-19 is here.

“A new deadly pandemic is at our doorstep,” the Oct. 2 Facebook video claimed. “The new threat comes in the form of an unknown virus, more lethal and more contagious than anything we have experienced before.”

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.)

(Screengrab from Facebook)

The Facebook video also mentions World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warning about the next pandemic.

During his May address to the World Health Assembly, Tedros said the end of the COVID-19 global health emergency does not mean the virus is no longer a concern.

“The threat of another variant emerging that causes new surges of disease and death remains. And the threat of another pathogen emerging with even deadlier potential remains,” he said.

Nevertheless, no new global health crisis has been declared.

The World Health Organization maintains a list of “priority pathogens” to identify and prepare for diseases that could cause global outbreaks or pandemics. The current priority diseases are:

According to the World Health Organization, Disease X “represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease.”

Conspiracy theorists have hijacked the term Disease X to spread baseless narratives that future pandemics are “planned” or “money-making scams.”

The World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public health authorities track disease outbreaks around the globe and send alerts to the public about emerging health threats. But, as of Oct. 5, there were no reports of an unknown disease causing widespread infection.

We rate the claim that “a new deadly pandemic is at our doorstep” False.

RELATED: What is Disease X? How conspiracy theorists hijacked pandemic preparedness 

RELATED: COVID-19 lockdowns returning? Here’s why public health experts say that’s unlikely

As United Auto Workers strike against the leading U.S. automakers, former President Donald Trump took credit for saving the auto industry.

“When I came into office, the auto industry was on its knees, gasping its last breaths after eight long years of Obama and Biden,” Trump told nonunion autoworkers Sept. 27 at Drake Enterprises in Clinton Township, outside Detroit. “It is no exaggeration to state the Trump presidency and the deftly used and applied Trump tariffs and taxes saved the American auto industry from extinction time and time again.”

But recent history shows the reality is the opposite: Trump neither inherited a nearly dead auto industry nor revived it. Experts say the Bush and Obama administrations helped boost the auto industry while Trump administration actions hurt it.

Bush and Obama administrations’ actions

In 2008, as the Great Recession was hurting the U.S., the auto industry was in dire shape. Layoffs were soaring at auto plants and auto parts suppliers. Gasoline prices were up. Buying power was down. General Motors was nearly out of cash to pay its bills and Chrysler was close behind.

Interventions by the outgoing George W. Bush and newly elected Barack Obama administrations pulled the industry back from the brink of collapse. Under Obama, GM and Chrysler underwent quick, taxpayer-financed bankruptcy reorganizations orchestrated by a federal task force and the U.S. Treasury Department. Both auto companies emerged healthily from the Great Recession, adding jobs and production capacity. 

“At its basic level, the car companies got a well-financed restructuring, and the financier was the government,” Mike Ramsey, an automotive analyst and senior research director at consulting company Gartner told Business Insider in 2018. “The companies were essentially given a clean balance sheet and reset to a point that made them viable.”

Manufacturing output of motor vehicles and parts rose along with employment in Michigan’s auto sector during the Obama administration. 

The Center for Automotive Research examined major investments in the auto industry and found that from 2013 to 2016, during the Obama administration, $47.3 billion in work was announced. By comparison, during the Trump years, 2017 to 2020, $38 billion in projects were announced. 

Trump cites trade deals and tariffs that, taken together, did not yield net industry gains

In his Michigan speech, Trump cited several of his trade policies that he said helped the industry. An expert we spoke to pointed to one Trump tariff that led to a small increase in U.S. auto parts production. But the majority of Trump’s policies hurt the industry or had no significant impact during Trump’s presidency.

Tariffs on Chinese imports: Trump imposed tariffs up to 25% on China’s auto production in 2018. Although Trump’s tariffs aimed to punish China, U.S. companies got many parts from other countries, said Katheryn N. Russ, chair of the University of California, Davis’ economics department. At the same time, the U.S. International Trade Commission (see table 6.23) found that these tariffs led to a 3% increase in U.S. domestic gross output in auto parts production.

But China retaliated, raising tariffs on U.S. exports to China. Beijing’s tariffs led to a significant reduction in U.S. auto exports to China, said Brad Setser, a U.S. trade official during the Biden administration. In response to the tariffs, Tesla also bought a subsidiary in China and its Shanghai production began exporting to the EU while U.S. exports of electric vehicles to both China and Europe fell sharply. 

Trump’s campaign told PolitiFact that without the tariffs he imposed on China, the U.S. might have seen the soaring number of car imports from China that the E.U. experienced. 

Renegotiated Korea Free Trade agreement: As part of Trump’s renegotiation of this agreement, he extended until 2041 a 25% U.S. tariff on imports of small pickup trucks.

But James Rubenstein, a Miami University in Ohio geography professor known for his auto industry research, said the tariff is largely “symbolic” because “Hyundai/Kia, which is responsible for most vehicle production in Korea, does not produce a pickup truck.” 

Stopped Trans-Pacific Partnership: In his first month in office, Trump ordered the U.S. to withdraw from this free trade deal with 11 Asian-Pacific countries. Obama had negotiated the agreement, but it was never implemented. No one knows with certainty what the impact of this deal would have been on the auto industry.

Replaced NAFTA with USMCA: Trump replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, in place since 1994, with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

The new agreement took effect July 2020 and aimed to encourage auto manufacturers to source auto parts from Canada, Mexico and the U.S. It required that 75% of an automobile’s components be manufactured in those three countries to qualify for zero tariffs. NAFTA had required that 62.5% of the components be manufactured in those three countries. 

Gary Hufbauer, an economist and trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington, D.C., think tank, said that although the USMCA changes tightened the auto production rules, they made little difference in the U.S. auto industry.  

That’s partly because auto manufacturers seem to prefer the alternative option of paying the 2.5% Most Favored Nation tariff on imported parts or assembled automobiles from Canada and Mexico, which is often cheaper and simpler than adhering to the rules-of-origin requirements. 

Automotive News’ data shows the number of vehicles assembled throughout the United States by Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co. and Chrysler parent Stellantis. In 2008, Obama’s first year in office, 5 million vehicles were assembled. That rose to 6.3 million in 2016, Obama’s final year. In 2019, the last year of Trump’s presidency before the pandemic, the number fell to 4.5 million vehicles. 

Trump steel tariffs hurt auto industry

One of Trump’s tariff actions hampered the U.S. auto industry, sparking the loss of thousands of jobs.

In March 2018, Trump imposed a 25% tariff on steel imports and a 10% tariff on imported aluminum, with exemptions for Canada and Mexico. The move was intended to punish China.  

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors found that by mid-2019, increased input costs related to the steel and aluminum tariffs were associated with 0.6% fewer jobs in the manufacturing sector. Based on those figures, Russ and Harvard University economics doctoral student Lydia Cox found that equated to about 75,000 fewer jobs in manufacturing. That figure did not include additional losses experienced by U.S. exporters that faced tariffs levied by other countries in retaliation. 

“It is hard to find a plausible explanation for how levying a tax on a key input for the auto industry would have been beneficial to the auto industry,” Russ said.

Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor and economics at the Center for Automotive Research, told Reuters in October 2020 that the tariffs hurt the industry. GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler, now part of Stellantis, all closed plants in Michigan since 2018, the year the tariffs were imposed. It cost GM and Ford $1 billion each for increased steel costs in 2018.

We found accumulating evidence that Trump’s overall tariff strategy backfired. A December 2020 summary from the Congressional Research Service, Congress’ nonpartisan policy arm, said most studies “suggest a negative overall effect on U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) as a result of the tariffs” and that most studies found U.S. consumers and companies “bore nearly the entire increased costs associated with the tariffs.”

Our ruling

When Trump took office, “the auto industry was on its knees gasping its last breath.” Trump administration “tariffs and taxes saved the American auto industry from extinction.”

Trump is wrong on both counts. Actions by the Bush and Obama administrations helped revive the auto industry; it was not near death when Trump took office.

The majority of Trump’s trade deals and tariffs hurt the auto industry or had no significant impact during his presidency. In particular, Trump’s 2018 tariffs on steel and aluminum significantly hurt the U.S. auto industry.

We rate this statement False.

PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Jon Greenberg contributed to this fact-check.

RELATED: As auto industry plateaus, Donald Trump touts car plants that don’t exist

RELATED: Auto sector jobs up by nearly 300,000 so far on Biden’s watch

RELATED: Nikki Haley overreaches with attack on Democrats over gasoline cars, gas stoves