Not Real News
A look at false and misleading claims circulating as the United States moves closer to approving a COVID-19 vaccine and distribution is underway in the United Kingdom. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:
<b>Claim</b>The first two recipients of the COVID-19 vaccine in Britain are “crisis actors.” The image of the first person who was vaccinated on Dec. 8 was published in October, long before the vaccine was approved. The same nurse was photographed administering the vaccine to two people, in two locations 20 miles apart.<b>Facts</b>After Margaret Keenan, 90, and William Shakespeare, 81, became the first two people to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech shot outside of a clinical trial, multiple false posts surfaced on social media suggesting that they were hired actors.Britain was the first country in the world to deliver the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to the general public.One Twitter post falsely claimed that an image of Keenan being vaccinated first appeared on CNN in October: “Excuse me, but how is the exact same person who's the 'first to get vaccinated' today...also in a CNN photo wearing the exact same clothes, in the exact same chair, and getting a shot back in October? Which one of these lying stories did you want us to pretend is true?”The post had over 6,000 retweets. The post compares two screenshots. One shows a BBC story dated Dec. 8 featuring an image of Keenan receiving the vaccine. The second screenshot shows an Oct. 22 CNN article about COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. The CNN article includes an image from a video that shows Keenan receiving her shot. But that is because when viewing some articles on CNN.com, a video player automatically plays the latest news reports related to the topic. CNN readers who navigated to the October article this week were shown the recent video from the Dec. 8 vaccination on the same page.
<b>Claim</b>The head of research at Pfizer says the COVID-19 vaccine causes female sterilization because it contains a spike protein known as syncytin-1.<b>Facts</b>The Pfizer and BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine does not contain the protein syncytin-1, which is important for the creation of placenta.The head of research at Pfizer made no such claim. Social media users are sharing a screenshot from an article titled “Head of Pfizer Research: Covid Vaccine is Female Sterilization” to claim the vaccine results in sterilization of women. Information in the article, carried by the blog “Health and Money News,” is attributed to Michael Yeadon, a retired British doctor who left Pfizer nine years ago.The article says “the vaccine contains a spike protein called syncytin-1, vital for the formation of human placenta in women.” It goes on to say “the vaccine works so that we form an immune response AGAINST the spike protein, we are also training the female body to attack syncytin-1, which could lead to infertility in women of an unspecified duration.”Posts carrying the false information shared a petition filed by Yeadon and Wolfgang Wodarg, a German physician, to the European Medicines Agency that demanded that clinical trials of the Pfizer vaccine be stopped in the European Union until more safety and efficacy data can be provided.In the petition, the two acknowledge that there is no indication “whether antibodies against spike proteins of SARS viruses would also act like anti-Syncytin-1 antibodies.” But they go on to say “if this were to be the case this would then also prevent the formation of a placenta which would result in vaccinated women essentially becoming infertile,” the petition says.
