Category: Fact Check

Quick Take

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III reportedly told House members that failure to provide more aid for Ukraine could lead to Russia’s invasion of a NATO ally and a direct U.S. military response in accordance with the NATO treaty. A viral post by Tucker Carlson misleadingly omits Austin’s explanation of why U.S. troops might be required.

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For months, the Biden administration has been telling Congress that Ukraine needs more support in its war with Russia. The administration’s request for more funding for Ukraine has gotten increasingly urgent in recent weeks.

In an Oct. 20 address to the nation, President Joe Biden warned that the failure to stop Russia from conquering Ukraine will embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade countries that are members of NATO – a military alliance formed in 1949 to keep the peace in Europe after World War II.

Biden has said he would not send troops to fight in Ukraine, which is not a NATO member. But Biden said in his address, “if Putin attacks a NATO ally, we will defend every inch of NATO which the treaty requires and calls for.”

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III brought that message to a closed briefing of House members on Dec. 5. He said that failure to approve more aid for Ukraine could “very likely” lead to the need for U.S. troops to defend NATO allies in Europe against Russia, the Messenger reported.

But a Dec. 7 post by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, which was shared on Instagram on Dec. 8, misleadingly omits Austin’s explanation of why and where American troops would be needed if Ukraine loses the war with Russia.

Carlson’s post, which shows a photo of Austin shaking hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said: “The Biden administration is openly threatening Americans over Ukraine. In a classified briefing in the House yesterday, defense secretary Lloyd Austin informed members that if they don’t appropriate more money for Zelensky, ‘we’ll send your uncles, cousins and sons to fight Russia.’ Pay the oligarchs or we’ll kill your kids.”

Austin was referring to the U.S. commitment to its NATO allies in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in 1949. Carlson made no reference to Article 5 in his tweet, which received more than 100,000 likes, and he did not explain what could happen if Russia invades a NATO country.   

North Atlantic Treaty, Article 5: The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

A day after Austin’s meeting with congressional members, Biden referenced Article 5 in remarks urging Congress to provide more funding for Ukraine.

“If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there. It’s important to see the long run here. He’s going to keep going. He’s made that pretty clear,” Biden said on Dec. 6. “If Putin … keeps going and then he attacks a NATO ally — well, we’ve committed as a NATO member that we’d defend every inch of NATO territory. Then we’ll have something that we don’t seek and that we don’t have today: American troops fighting Russian troops — American troops fighting Russian troops if he moves into other parts of NATO.”

After Austin’s briefing, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul told the Messenger, “If [Vladimir] Putin takes over Ukraine, he’ll get Moldova, Georgia, then maybe the Baltics.” The Baltic nations — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — are former republics of the Soviet Union and now members of NATO.

“And then the idea that we’ll have to put troops on the ground in Secretary Austin’s word was very likely,” said McCaul, a Texas Republican who has supported aid for Ukraine.

A spokesperson for McCaul told us in an email that Carlson’s post “is very much lacking context.” The spokesperson directed us to another McCaul staffer for more information, but that person didn’t provide further comment.

Some other Republican leaders have also warned of Russia’s possible aggression toward NATO countries if it succeeds in Ukraine.

In a Dec. 10 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah said, “My own view is that it’s very much in America’s interest to see Ukraine successful and to provide the weapons that Ukraine needs to defend itself. Anything other than that would be a huge dereliction of our responsibility, I believe, to the world of democracy but also to our own national interest. Because if Putin thinks he can invade his neighbor with impunity and that we’re just going to step back, that we’re going to say, ‘Oh, we’re tired; we’re not going to keep on helping,’ then, guess what? He’s not going to stop. And he’s going to go into a NATO nation that’s going to draw NATO and our troops into war with Russia.”

After Carlson tweeted about Austin’s meeting with Congress, Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin, citing sources who attended the briefing, tweeted that Carlson’s “characterization” of Austin’s statements was wrong.

“This characterization of Austin’s remarks is 100 percent not true, acc to two sources who were in the briefings. Austin warned that it is not hyperbole to say Putin won’t stop at Ukraine. If he enters NATO territory US troops could be called to fight; cheaper to fund Ukraine now,” Griffin reported.

We wrote about a similar claim on social media when Zelenskyy warned that a Russian invasion of one of the Baltic states could spark a response from the U.S. military.

But we noted that Katherine Yon Ebright, of the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote in a 2022 report that the language of Article 5 is “relatively flexible.” It allows NATO members to determine how to respond to an attack on an ally — which could mean sending equipment, imposing sanctions, or engaging in direct military action, she wrote.

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Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

Sources

Baldor, Lolita C., and Tara Copp. “The Pentagon warns Congress it is running low on money to replace weapons sent to Ukraine.” Associated Press. 2 Oct 2023.

Jennifer Griffin @JenGriffinFNC. “This characterization of Austin’s remarks is 100 percent not true, acc to two sources who were in the briefings. Austin warned that it is not hyperbole to say Putin won’t stop at Ukraine. If he enters NATO territory US troops could be called to fight; cheaper to fund Ukraine now.” X. 7 Dec 2023.

Mascaro, Lisa and Colleen Long. “Biden will ask Congress for $13B to support Ukraine, $12B for disaster fund, an AP source says.” Associated Press. 10 Aug 2023.

McPherson, Lindsey. “Austin Warns Congress Failing to Pass Ukraine Aid ‘Very Likely’ Leads to US Troops on the Ground in Europe.” 5 Dec 2023.

Meet the Press. Interview with Sen. Mitt Romney. NBC. 10 Dec 2023.

NATO. NATO member countries. Nato.int. 8 Jun 2023.

NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty. Nato.int. 4 Apr 1949. Updated 19 Oct 2023.

Solender, Andrew. “Top House Republicans try to stem the GOP’s anti-Ukraine tide.” Axios. 5 Dec 2023.

Spencer, Saranac Hall. “Social Media Posts Misrepresent Zelenskyy’s Remarks on U.S. Military Involvement.” FactCheck.org. 2 Mar 2023.

Spokesperson for House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul. Email to FactCheck.org. 8 Dec 2023.

U.S. Department of State. Fact sheet: “The Ironclad U.S. Commitment to NATO.” 29 Nov 2021.

U.S. Department of State. Office of the Historian. “Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations.” Accessed 12 Dec 2023.

White House. “Remarks by President Biden on the Request to Congress for Additional Funding to Support Ukraine.” 28 Apr 2022.

White House. “Remarks by President Biden on the United States’ Response to Hamas’s Terrorist Attacks Against Israel and Russia’s Ongoing Brutal War Against Ukraine.” 20 Oct 2023.

White House. “Remarks by President Biden Urging Congress to Pass His National Security Supplemental Request, Including Funding to Support Ukraine.” 6 Dec 2023.

Yon Ebright, Katherine. Brennan Center for Justice. “NATO’s Article 5 Collective Defense Obligations, Explained.” Updated 15 Nov 2022.

SciCheck Digest

People who receive some vaccines that use live weakened viruses to stimulate a strong and lasting immune response sometimes release small amounts of those viruses outside of their bodies. That’s expected, and it doesn’t mean that they put vulnerable populations in “harm’s way,” as a post misleadingly suggests.

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Getting vaccinated is the safest way to get protection against certain diseases that can be dangerous and sometimes deadly. Multiple vaccines are recommended and especially important in children, the elderly and people with weakened immune systems and their close contacts, given that these groups are more susceptible to, and could suffer from complications from, preventable diseases. 

Different types of vaccines work in different ways, but they all prompt the body to mount an immune response against a specific pathogen, which provides protection against a particular disease without a person having to get sick. Live attenuated vaccines contain a small amount of live virus that has been weakened. The live attenuated vaccines routinely recommended in the U.S. are the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR vaccine; the varicella, or chickenpox, vaccine; the rotavirus vaccine; and the intranasal influenza vaccine. 

With live attenuated vaccines, since the virus is weakened but not inactivated or “killed,” the virus can still replicate in the body, although much less so than a natural virus. This creates very strong and long-lasting immune protection, similar to the immunity stimulated by natural infection. It also means the weakened virus could be released or discharged outside the body, and, if there is a large amount of it, potentially transmitted to others. But that doesn’t mean that the vaccines are harmful or shouldn’t be used.

“When a pathogen replicates in the body, it can be shed in respiratory secretions or in stool. We call that shedding,” Benjamin Lopman, professor of epidemiology and environmental health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, told us in an email. “In some instances, it is possible for shed LAVs to be transmitted to other persons. However, since LAVs are safe, this generally does not present a problem,” he said, referring to live attenuated vaccines.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, live attenuated vaccines “usually do not cause disease such as that caused by the wild form of the organism. When a live, attenuated vaccine does cause disease, it is usually much milder than the natural disease and is considered an adverse reaction to the vaccine.”

But a post published on Instagram gives the misleading impression that live attenuated vaccines are not safe and put vulnerable groups “in harm’s way.”

“Aren’t  supposed to protect the vulnerable people from disease?  can actually spread disease. Maybe’ you’ve heard of it, it’s known as shedding,” reads the caption of the Instagram post, which includes six slides about shedding and vaccines. 

The post continues by quoting a line from an article on live attenuated vaccines published in 2010 in Nature Biotechnology.

“Because LAVs (live attenuated viruses) are shed from , they sometimes present a risk to un- individuals with impaired immunity,” reads the post, which incorrectly says the article was published by the National Institutes of Health.

The post continues: “So young children, pregnant women, immune compromised, the elderly…..that group of individuals we are told as those who choose not the , that we are putting in harm’s way.” 

Raul Andino-Pavlovsky, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of California, San Francisco, and one of the authors of the article cited in the Instagram post, told us in an email that not all live attenuated vaccines can be transmitted. “Most LAVs are not transmissible,” he wrote.

Moreover, he said, “it is crucial to emphasize that LAV viruses are attenuated in their pathogenicity. This means they replicate less effectively and do not infect tissues and organs where they cause disease.”

In other words, since the weakened virus reproduces less effectively than the naturally occurring virus would, less virus is shed, which makes it harder for someone else to get infected. And again, since the virus has been debilitated, it’s not able to produce symptoms in most people. 

For this reason, in most cases, even people living with someone who is immunocompromised can — and in fact should — be vaccinated, including with live attenuated vaccines. 

“Children in the homes of immune-compromised people can safely receive all routinely recommended vaccines. Adults in the home or in close contact with immune-compromised individuals should also be up to date on all routinely recommended vaccines, so they do not inadvertently expose the vulnerable person to vaccine-preventable diseases,” as the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Vaccine Education Center explains.

“Being a household contact of a pregnant woman or immunosuppressed person is usually not a contraindication to vaccination,” the CDC’s Pink Book, which is the agency’s guide to vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases, says. “In fact, it is critical that healthy household contacts of pregnant women and immunosuppressed persons be vaccinated. Vaccination of healthy contacts reduces the chance that pregnant women and immunosuppressed persons will be exposed to vaccine-preventable diseases.”

Of the vaccines given in the U.S., the only vaccine that should not be given to people who are in close contact with immunocompromised people is the smallpox vaccine, which is only given in select circumstances. There are also some additional precautions that can be taken in a few other instances, as we’ll explain below. But the general notion that people should avoid vaccination because of shedding concerns is incorrect.

Some Vaccine Shedding Is Expected

The fact that some live attenuated vaccines shed is generally not cause for alarm.

Shedding is common after receiving a live attenuated influenza vaccine, according to the CDC, especially among younger people. Shedding is not the same as transmission, since transmission requires a larger amount of virus. Transmission of shed influenza vaccine viruses from vaccinated to unvaccinated people has been documented, according to the agency, “but has not been reported to be associated with serious illness,” the CDC explains. Close contacts of immunocompromised people can receive the live attenuated influenza vaccine, unless the person with immunocompetence is in a protective environment, according to the agency.

In a 2006 clinical study among 197 children, ages 9 months to 3 years, who received a vaccine or placebo, 80% of the vaccine recipients shed at least one vaccine strain, and one transmission was documented. The probability of transmission was calculated at 0.58%. “No clinically significant illness occurred among children who received vaccine or placebo or in the child to whom the vaccine virus was transmitted,” according to the study.

With the chickenpox, or varicella, vaccine, the manufacturer says transmission of the vaccine virus “may occur rarely between healthy vaccinees who develop a varicella-like rash and healthy susceptible contacts.” It adds that according to findings from a placebo-controlled trial with 416 placebo recipients who were household contacts of 445 vaccine recipients, “if vaccine virus transmission occurred, it did so at a very low rate and possibly without recognizable clinical disease in contacts.” A person who gets vaccinated against chickenpox and lives with someone who is immunocompromised does not need to take any extra precautions, the CDC says, unless they develop a rash. If that happens, the vaccinated person should stay away from the vulnerable person until the rash resolves.

Similarly, shedding and transmission have been detected with the rotavirus vaccine. According to the manufacturer, in the safety and efficacy trial, shedding in the stool was detected in 32 of 360 vaccine recipients after dose one, but in none of 249 vaccine recipients after dose two. Transmission was not evaluated in phase 3 studies, but has been observed.

For this reason, the CDC recommends that everyone in a household with an immunocompromised person take particular care to wash their hands after changing the diaper of an infant who received rotavirus vaccine. But again, this is not a good reason to not vaccinate a child in the first place.

As a 2008 review on viral shedding from rotavirus vaccines put it, “[s]ince the risk of vaccine transmission and subsequent vaccine-derived disease with the current vaccines is much less than the risk of wildtype rotavirus disease in immunocompromised contacts, vaccination should be encouraged.”

The main live vaccine for which viral shedding can be a real problem is the oral polio vaccine. The vaccine hasn’t been used in the U.S. since 2000, but other countries use it because it can prevent onward transmission of polio and is better for eradication efforts. Most of the time, viral shedding of the weakened vaccine virus is not a concern — and it can even be beneficial because it provides contact immunity or indirect vaccination, as experts told us for a previous story.

But sometimes the vaccine virus can change back into a more dangerous virus that can cause paralysis. This happens when the virus accumulates mutations after circulating for a long time in populations with low rates of vaccination or in immunocompromised people. This strain of vaccine-derived poliovirus can shed and infect others, putting unvaccinated people at risk of getting polio.

This only stresses the importance of vaccination among vulnerable groups. Polio was eliminated in the U.S. in 1979 thanks to widespread vaccination. And as part of the efforts to eradicate polio globally, scientists developed a new version of the oral polio vaccine, first rolled out in 2021, that is less likely to revert and cause vaccine-derived poliovirus outbreaks.

Live Attenuated Vaccine Contraindications

Although live attenuated vaccines are generally safe, they are contraindicated for certain groups and in certain instances. 

They are not recommended for pregnant people due to a “theoretical risk of virus transmission to the fetus,” according to the CDC.

The CDC also says that live vaccines usually shouldn’t be given to severely immunocompromised people, such as people with leukemia, or people taking drugs that can cause severe immunosuppression, such as someone undergoing treatment for cancer. This is because these individuals may be unable to limit the replication of the weakened vaccine virus, which can lead to severe illness or death. Still, some immunocompromised people may receive some live attenuated vaccines safely, so patients should consult their doctors, since recommendations vary case by case. 

Most live attenuated vaccines “can safely be given to vulnerable people with some exceptions,” Lopman, from Emory University, told us.  

“Live attenuated vaccines have been used for as long as vaccines have existed. They are widely used globally and are generally safe,” Lopman said. “Severe reactions are extremely rare.”

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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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“Vaccines Types.” HHS. Accessed 11 Dec 2023.

“Epidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases.” CDC. 18 Aug 2021.

“Vaccine (Shot) for Measles.” CDC. Accessed 11 Dec 2023. 

“Vaccine (Shot) for Mumps.” CDC. Accessed 11 Dec 2023.

“Vaccine (Shot) for Rubella.” CDC. Accessed 11 Dec 2023.

“Vaccine (Shot) for Chickenpox.” CDC. Accessed 11 Dec 2023.

“Vaccine (Drops) for Rotavirus.” CDC. Accessed 11 Dec 2023.

“Live Attenuated Influenza Vaccine [LAIV] (The Nasal Spray Flu Vaccine).” CDC. Accessed 11 Dec 2023.

“Making Vaccines: How Are Vaccines Made?”. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Vaccine Education Center. Accessed 11 Dec 2023. 

“Altered Immunocompetence.” CDC. Accessed 11 Dec 2023. 

“A Look at Each Vaccine: Smallpox Vaccine.” Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Vaccine Education Center. Accessed 11 Dec 2023. 

McDonald, Jessica. “Poliovirus Found in New York City Wastewater, Not Tap Water.” FactCheck.org. 18 Aug 2022.

Lopman, Benjamin. Professor of epidemiology and environmental health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. Email sent to FactCheck.org. 5 Dec 2023. 

Andino-Pavlovsky, Raul. Professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of California, San Francisco. Email sent to FactCheck.org. 5 Dec 2023. 

“Infectious Diseases And Immune-Compromised People.” Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Vaccine Education Center. Spring 2020. 

“Safety of Influenza Vaccines.” CDC. Accessed 11 Dec 2023.

“Varivax.” FDA. Accessed 11 Dec 2023.

“RotaTeq.” FDA. Accessed 11 Dec 2023.

“Vaccine-Derived Poliovirus.” CDC. Accessed 11 Dec 2023.

Jaramillo, Catalina. “No Scientific Basis for Vaccine ‘Shedding’ Claims.” FactCheck.org. 11 May 2021. 

“A pregnant woman in Southern Israel was found by Hamas terrorists. They dissected her body. Her stomach was cut open and they took the fetus out with the umbilical cord. And let the unborn child die slowly out of his mother’s womb. This is what inhuman savages Hamas do to people.”

Aditya Raj Kaul, the executive editor of TV9 Network, tweeted this on October 10. Seen in battle fatigues in his X (formerly Twitter) profile photo, Kaul has over 4 lakh followers on the platform. This tweet racked up over 32000 likes and more than 10 million views. Given the ghastly nature of violence ‘reported’ by Kaul, it was only expected. However, there’s a problem. If one goes through the comments under Kaul’s tweet, one would find several users expressing doubts over the veracity of Kaul’s claims. The tweet was flagged by Twitter’s community notes which stated that there was no proof of Hamas inflicting such violence upon an Israeli woman. The note pointed out that the said incident was similar to a report of the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian people by Israelis in 1982. Some accused Kaul of mirroring the violence inflicted on Kausar Banu during the 2002 Gujarat riots.

However, Kaul seemed quite nonchalant about the questions over the veracity of his ‘reporting’. “The context is given by Hamas terror supporters and not Twitter. Where does it say that if some crime has happened in 1992 it can’t happen again?”, he responded to a user, asking them not to become a supporter or spokesperson for Hamas. Kaul went on to assert that he didn’t need to present evidence of the incident because he had no obligation to “satisfy any politician.” In another tweet, he claimed that his friend Avishay, who is on-ground, had reported the incident to him. Avishay had also apparently shared photos with him but unfortunately, he couldn’t post the images.

It is practically impossible for journalists or fact-checkers to independently verify this sort of information amid a war that has seen such scale of violence as the present Israel-Hamas conflict. All that can be reasonably stated about this particular claim is that there isn’t enough evidence in the public domain to back it up. However, there is a tested appetite for such sensational claims which results in the type of traction that Kaul’s tweet got. We looked up the text from Kaul’s tweet on Twitter and found that over ten handles had used what is known as ‘copypasta’ – a tactic where a block of text is copied and pasted by several people to amplify a certain narrative. Upon looking up relevant keywords, we found hundreds of tweets with the same claim in November itself. None of them cared for the fact that the claim was unverified and unverifiable and that amplifying it essentially amounted to creating atrocity propaganda favouring Israel. What is more, those expressing their doubts were labelled by Kaul as supporters or spokespersons for Hamas.

Over the past one and a half months, Indian social media influencers who align themselves with the political Right have been on an overdrive sharing and amplifying pro-Israel propaganda on social media — misleading claims, unverifiable narratives, false quotes, old and unrelated photos and videos: misinformation and disinformation of almost every kind. This report will delve into the whos, the whys and the whats of this propaganda ecosystem.

India’s Official Stance vis-a-vis Israel & Palestine

As an initial response to the Hamas attack on October 7, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, like many other global leaders, expressed “deep shock” at the “news of terrorist attacks”. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the innocent victims and their families. We stand in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour”, his tweet read. Five days later, Union external affairs ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi called for respect for international law and reiterated India’s position in favour of establishing a “sovereign, independent, and viable state of Palestine”.

On October 27, India abstained from voting in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on a resolution seeking a ceasefire in Gaza and unhindered humanitarian access to the war-ravaged region. This is somewhat in contrast with the pro-Palestine stance that India has historically taken since 1948.

India and Israel have had a chequered past, as far as diplomatic relations are concenrned. India’s struggle for independence in the 1940s resulted in a shared solidarity with the erstwhile British Mandate for Palestine. India proposed a plan in 1947 to create an independent federal state of Palestine, with safeguards to the Jewish minority. When the UNGA passed the 1947 resolution that recommended establishing the State of Israel alongside a Palestinian one, India was one of the few non-Arab countries that had voted against it. In 1974, India was the first non-Arab country to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the “sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” India was also the first non-Arab country to recognize the State of Palestine when the PLO proclaimed it in 1988.

On the other hand, as far as Israel is concerned, in 1950 India was “in a position to move towards establishing full diplomatic relations with Israel” and Israel was formally recognized in India for the first time. However, it was only in 1992 that India granted full diplomatic recognition to Israel, setting up the Israeli Embassy in New Delhi.

Israel demonstrated its interest in providing arms and ammunition during the 1999 India-Pakistan war. In recent years, India has purchased about $2 billion worth of ammunition from Israel and is now the Israeli defence industry’s biggest foreign customer. In 2017, Narendra Modi became the first Indian PM to visit Israel, and Benjamin Netanyahu travelled to New Delhi in 2018. The bonhomie painted a perfect picture in the collective psyche of the Indian Right Wing, as its dream of an Akhand Bharat as a Hindu nation aligned perfectly with the religious-nationalist state of Israel.

Months after the Israel visit, in 2018, Modi created history by becoming the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. After holding talks with Palestinian chief of state Mahmoud Abbas, Modi said India hoped to see an “independent Palestinian state living in an environment of peace”. India also increased its contributions to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

I consider it an honour to be in Palestine. I bring with me the goodwill and greetings of the people of India. Here are my remarks at the joint press meet with President Abbas. https://t.co/lUWKPB9Nxe pic.twitter.com/3uUPtuh4gP

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 10, 2018

Throughout, however, India has remained cognizant of potential diplomatic repercussions, prompting Modi to engage in discussions with various Arab Gulf leaders to align positions. Recently, India voted in favour of a UNGA resolution condemning Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.

For the Indian Right Wing, Taking Sides has been Easy

Though the Indian government has treaded cautiously, the country’s Right Wing ecosystem, which has a robust social media presence, has wasted little time in deciding its stand on the present conflict. Sharing borders with Muslim countries that they perceive as hostile, and having a Muslim minority population at home, India and Israel mirror each others’ demographic anxieties. In the last 10 years of the Hindu-nationalist BJP’s rule in India, this anxiety has transformed into rampant Islamophobia and communal hatred visible in almost every sphere of life. In 41% of all the fact checks that Alt News did in 2022, the target of misinformation/disinformation was Muslims. The ongoing conflict has provided the Right Wing with an opportunity to amplify that Islamophobia. Consequently, the massacre of Palestinians — an overwhelming majority of whom are Muslims (see here and here) — by Israel in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack has found strong support among the Hindu Right.

A large share of tweets with the hashtag #IStandWithIsrael came from Indian users and thousands of Indian accounts added the flag of Israel next to their X handles.

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Driven by their sense of animosity towards Palestinians, Indian Right Wing influencers on social media have gone on an overdrive disseminating misinformation and disinformation targeting Palestine since the Hamas attack on October 7. X witnessed a flood of old, unrelated photos, videos and unverifiable claims being linked to the ongoing conflict. In a bid to delegitimize support for Palestine, anyone speaking or demonstrating for Palestine and the human rights of Palestinians have been dubbed as ‘potential terrorists’ and accused of defending Hamas. There have been instances of Indian users sharing pro-Palestine misinformation, but these are minuscule in proportion, compared to the counter-narrative.

Several national and international media outlets have reported how Indian turned out to be a hotbed of misinformation related to the ongoing war. Al Jazeera wrote, “… the Israel-Hamas war has given a massive reach to social media accounts in India – both large and small – that have managed to ride a wave of anti-Muslim and pro-Israel fervour.” The Diplomat noted, “While this exploitation of international events to fuel domestic events is not new, what can be observed is the emergence of a voluntary and decentralized disinformation campaign by Hindu nationalists in support of Israel. Calling themselves “digital champions” of Israel, individual accounts with large followings push unverified one-sided news against Hamas, which have gained substantial momentum online… As the current conflict unfolds, Israel’s intense retaliation toward Hamas and the deadly strikes against Gaza are being co-opted by Hindu nationalists to advance their anti-Muslim agenda.”

Indian fact-checking website Boomlive spoke to several journalists from the Arab region, including from the West Bank-based fact-checking organization Kashif, and all of them named India as the top three regions they were monitoring to debunk claims about Israel and Palestine, Boom noted in a recent report.

Two of the three reports noted above mentioned the unverified claims made by TV9 journalist Aditya Raj Kaul.

Old, Unrelated Media

As is common during times of conflict, social media was flooded with unrelated images and photos being linked to the ongoing war. Alt News has debunked around 40 such claims.

A recurrent pattern noticeable in the anti-Palestine misinformation shared by Indian users is the usage of terms like ‘Jihad‘, ‘terrorists‘ and the likes. These are terms that are commonly described by Indian Right Wing influencers to refer to Muslims. In a lot of cases, the October 7 attack by Hamas had been generalized under the garb of ‘Islamic Terrorism’ while Right Wing accounts shared unrelated videos to assert that Israel had effectively countered such terrorism. The use of hashtags like #IslamIsTheProblem was also seen.

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A graphic video of a member of a Mexican Cartel extracting a man’s heart from his body and eating it went viral with the claim that a Hamas terrorist was inflicting such atrocities on an Israeli citizen. Indian users amplified this claim, garnering thousands of likes and retweets. “Wake Up! These are monsters!” read Indian-origin user @JIX5A’s tweet. Readers can find our fact-check here.

Clips from the military tactical shooter video game ARMA 3 were being falsely linked to the ongoing crisis. For instance, an ARMA 3 footage was circulated as being representative of Hamas fighters shooting down 4 Israeli war helicopters. Verified Indian-origin user @IacGaurav, who has close to 17000 followers on Twitter, was one of the individuals who shared the viral clip.

Just-In🚨🚨

Hamas fighters shot down 4 Israel war helicopters in Gaza, Palestine 🇵🇸#Israel | #Hamas | #Ghaza #FreePalestine #Mossad #Palestine #SAvSL #SLvsSA #SAvsSL

Only loss of humanity,Peace..

https://t.co/JoRgWxZFBs

— 𝑮𝒂𝒖𝒓𝒂𝒗 𝑹𝒂𝒊 (@IacGaurav) October 7, 2023

Alt News also debunked anti-Israel misinformation, but as pointed out earlier, such instances have been few and far between. A video of a group of soldiers in uniform forcefully detaining a young child was shared widely on social media. When a bystander was seen protesting, the officers pushed him off and whisked the boy away. RJ Sayema had tweeted the video with the caption, “Tears my heart apart! This is cruelty of unimaginable magnitude. Stop the bloodshed in Gaza.” In reality, the video is eight years old and shows 6-year-old Abdullah Lutfi Yusuf being taken away by Israeli soldiers from a Palestinian refugee camp. Abdullah was released after being detained for several hours. Read Alt News fact-check here.

The #Pallywood Conspiracy Theory

As the war intensified, the various official handles of the state of Israel and pro-Israel influencers and social media users tried to question Palestine’s claims of the human cost of the war on their side. The word ‘Pallywood’, a portmanteau of Palestine and Hollywood, has been used as a hashtag to make the suggestion that Palestinians are faking and play-acting injury and death.

On October 25, US President Joe Biden said in a statement that he had “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using” for the death toll in the Gaza Strip. “What they say to me is I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war”, Biden said.

On X, pro-Israel Indian users, many of them Right Wing influencers with large followings, have questioned and even mocked Palestine’s claims of death and destruction, with or without the #Pallywood. In one instance, some users amplified old footage of a mock funeral to claim that Palestinians who were pretending to carry a dead body ran away when sirens started blaring. The dead body is seen running away as well. The Alt News fact check of this misleading claim can be read here.

Watch this video carefully until the end.. Some #Palestinians are seen carrying a small boy’s body while chanting religious praises.. They’ve even granted an interview to Al Jazeera.. alleging that this boy fell victim to #Israeli airstrikes.. However, in the end, as sirens… pic.twitter.com/fLy6a3Kn65

— R S 🇮🇳🇮🇳 (@rs_rajender) October 11, 2023

Going a step further, some Right Wing accounts went to the length of denying well-documented cases of deaths of Palestinians. They tried to establish the narrative that actual scenes of death were staged visuals with people play-acting death. For instance, a video of a dead Palestinian child being carried out of the Al Shifa hospital in Gaza was circulated online with the claim that it was a doll. Indian users including prominent Right Wing influencers, propaganda outlets, and journalists amplified the claim. “#Hamasterrorist’s propaganda failed badly,” remarked one such influencer. The fact-check can be read here.

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In a similar instance, a clip from a CNN report of a shrouded corpse was circulated online with users claiming that the dead body was caught ‘moving its head’. Indian RW influencer Arun Pudur was one of them. The Palestinian journalist who shot the viral footage refuted the viral claim in a statement to Alt News and an Alt News investigation found the viral allegations were baseless. Our fact check of this claim can be read here.

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In yet another instance of a false claim that Palestinians were faking casualties, a video of a Palestinian man on a hospital bed was circulated online with claims that it was Palestinian vlogger Saleh Aljafarawi. However, in reality, the video shows Saeed Zandek, a 16-year-old injured in an Israeli raid on Nur Shams refugee camp in July-August 2023. Neither was the video related to the current conflict nor was the man in the video an actor. Needless to say, several Right Wing influencers also actively amplified the viral misleading claim. One can read the Alt News investigation here.

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Unverifiable Claims

In several instances, journalists and media outlets, both international and Indian, carried reports/ updates based on unverified and unverifiable claims on social media. Such ‘reports’ ranged from allegations of ’40 babies being beheaded by Hamas militants’ to ‘baby put in the oven by Hamas militants,’ which were amplified without sufficient testimonies and verification, contributing to the spread of potentially inaccurate information. One may notice that such news items are often graphic in nature and have a tendency to attract more attention and viewership. It can be inferred that for these outlets, the thirst for viewership and sensationalism prevailed over the obligation to deliver accurate and verified information to their consumers.

Apart from journalist Aditya Raj Kaul (as discussed before), several other Indian users amplified the claim that a pregnant woman’s stomach was cut up and her baby was murdered by Hamas militants in Southern Israel. The tweets garnered thousands of likes and retweets.

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Indian media organisations including Mint, Wion and Zee News amplified this claim.

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In this backdrop, an old video from Mexico was also viral in an attempt to give credibility to this claim. The Alt News fact check of this can be read here.

Another sensational claim that spread like wildfire was that Hamas had beheaded 40 babies during its attack on October 7. A correspondent for the Israeli news outlet i24NEWS said in a video that Israeli soldiers had told her they had found “babies, their heads cut off.” In another tweet, the correspondent wrote that soldiers had told her they believed “40 babies/children were killed.” The connection between these two pieces of information led to the unverified narrative of “40 babies being beheaded.” In India, many news organisations and journalists reported this without attempting to independently verify the information.

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On October 11, major international media outlet CNN defended the viral claims and reported that Hamas had, in fact, beheaded babies, “confirmed” by a spokesperson for the Israeli prime minister’s office. The next day, the CNN reporter Sara Sidner issued an apology for the misleading report, acknowledging that the reports were not confirmed. In a subsequent report, CNN also reported that the Israeli government “has not confirmed the specific claim that Hamas attackers cut off the heads of babies during their shock attack” on October 7. “There have been cases of Hamas militants carrying out beheadings and other ISIS-style atrocities. However, we cannot confirm if the victims were men or women, soldiers or civilians, adults or children,” the official was quoted as saying said.

The Israeli army, too, denied the claim and said there was no information confirming the allegations that Hamas had “beheaded babies”.

#BREAKING Israeli army tells Anadolu that they have no information confirming allegations that ‘Hamas beheaded babies’ pic.twitter.com/fQJA7ui9bE

— Anadolu English (@anadoluagency) October 10, 2023

Major Misinformation Peddlers

Some of the prominent Right Wing X handles which shared pro-Israel or anti-Palestine misinformation and disinformation have been listed here. With thousands of followers, these users could easily make their posts get massive traction and go viral on the microblogging site.

X User Raushan Sinha aka @MrSinha_

Better known by his Twitter handle @mrsinha_, Raushan describes himself as an Indian political commentator, expert on foreign policy, a journalist and a Hindu Rights Activist. He has been fact-checked by Alt News several times in the past. Since the October 7 attack by Hamas, Raushan has tweeted about the conflict at least 100 times in October itself. All of his tweets are pro-Israel.

He amplified the unverified claim that 40 babies were beheaded by Hamas. “Shame on those who are supporting these monsters”, he said in his tweet. He also tweeted about the pregnant woman whose stomach was allegedly cut open and the baby left to die, another unverified claim that has been discussed earlier in the story.

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On October 8, Sinha shared misleading footage of a boy being beheaded by Hamas. The footage was actually from 2016, filmed in Syria. Members of Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki had captured a child in Handarat near Aleppo and executed him on the back of a pickup truck. The Alt News fact-check can be read here. Sinha later deleted the tweet, but not before it was viewed close to 3 million times and retweeted over 14,000 times.

Sinha has also been instrumental in amplifying the Pallywood conspiracy theory. He shared the misleading claim that 4-year-old Omar killed in the conflict was a doll. Another misleading claim that he amplified was that a man seen intubated on a hospital bed was Palestinian influencer Saleh Aljafarawi. Both these false claims have been discussed earlier in this report.

Raushan also shared a video of an ISIS flag being waved at a pro-Palestine protest in London. Our investigation found the claim to be untrue. The flag was a Shahada flag, according to the Police.

X User @MeghUpdates

Another Indian user who has shared misleading claims related to the Israel-Palestine conflict regularly is @MeghUpdates. The user shared an image of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his son and claimed that Netanyahu was sending his son to serve as a soldier. The tweet garnered 35,000 likes and over 6,000 retweets in two hours. The number of likes now stands at over 72000. The image is actually from December 1, 2014. Netanyahu’s youngest son had just begun his three-year mandatory military service and was accompanied by his parents as he arrived at Jerusalem’s Ammunition Hill. Here is the Alt News fact-check. (Archive)

Israel PM Netanyahu sends his son to serve the country as a soldier, Pic gets viral pic.twitter.com/cGDIaMP04x

— Megh Updates 🚨™ (@MeghUpdates) October 11, 2023

Needless to say, this user has also shared old and unrelated footage in an attempt to prove that Palestinians were faking their injuries. He shared footage of a 2013 demonstration by students in Egypt and linked it to the ongoing war. One of the ‘corpses’ can be seen moving its arm in the video. The user shared claiming it shows fake dead bodies arranged by Hamas. However, the video is from Egypt’s Al-Azhar University where students protested against police and the army by posing as dead bodies in 2013. Here is the Alt News fact-check.

In a similar instance, the user shared a video that features a girl with a blood-smeared face and a man can be seen walking in the background with a camera. They amplified the video with the Pallywood label. In reality, the footage is a behind-the-scenes shot of a Lebanese film on Gaza. One can read the Alt News fact-check here.

Media misreports & False Claims by Journalists

Journalists, media houses and propaganda outlets, too, shared false and unverified claims targeting Palestine on a regular basis.

Editor-in-chief of Right Wing propaganda outlet Sudarshan News Suresh Chavhanke, who has been fact-checked by Alt News several times in the past, has disseminated misleading information related to the ongoing conflict as well. In one such instance, Chavhanke falsely shared a 2021 video of Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan tearing a 20-page United Nations report documenting Israel’s violation of human rights as recent, lauding Erdan for his move. ‘मर्दों वाली बात’ he said in his tweet. In another instance, he shared an old video of protesters scaling a fence on the Israel-Lebanon border and claimed that terrorists were entering Israel amid the war.

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Despite being fact-checked and having community notes attached to his tweets, Chavhanke has not taken down the misleading tweet.

Journalist Aditya Raj Kaul has also had a significant role to play in disseminating anti-Palestine propaganda. After the Israel Defense Force claimed that the headquarters of Hamas’ terrorist activities were located in the tunnels underneath Shifa Hospital in Gaza, Kaul tweeted a 2021 Russia Today Arabic report on the elaborate tunnel network in Gaza, linking it to the ongoing crisis. Like Chavhanke, Kaul has also not taken his tweet down despite being fact-checked. Our fact-check of this claim can be read here.

Kaul also tweeted a video from 2021 of a Pakistani politician threatening to bomb Israel, with the misleading claim that it was related to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. In the video, Sarwat Fatima, a Pakistani Member of the Provincial Assembly, discusses Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities. Boomlive fact-checked the false claim by Kaul.

After being called out, Kaul put up a bizarre defense saying that the video was old but that ‘the confidence remains same’. “Pakistani politicians are as foolish and radical as it gets”, he added.

Pakistani Parliamentarian threatens Israel with Nuclear Weapons. 😂😂😂

“Our Atom Bomb is to defend Muslims. We call on our Prime Minister to convey to Israel to end war in Gaza against Palestine or else we will erase Israel from the face of this earth”. pic.twitter.com/bMN8opLzsW

— Aditya Raj Kaul (@AdityaRajKaul) October 17, 2023

Yet another ‘journalist’ with over 500000 followers on Twitter and a consistent track record of spreading misinformation, Abhijit Majumder has had a significant hand in propagating pro-Israel propaganda. On October 26, he shared a six-year-old video of a Palestinian make-up artist working on actors for a film project with the misleading hashtag #Pallywood. Despite being fact-checked, Majumder has not taken down his tweet.

Majumder also amplified Right Wing user MeghUpdates’s misleading tweet wherein they used a behind-the-scenes shot of a Lebanese film on Gaza claiming that it was yet another example of Palestinians faking their injuries. The tweet is still live on Majumder’s profile.

Several mainstream media outlets have also amplified misleading claims and used old, unrelated footage to report on the ongoing crisis. In one such instance, the Press Trust of India (PTI), Deccan Herald, Moneycontrol.com, Economic Times, The Telegraph, Times of India, and The Week falsely claimed that US President Joe Biden had cited the announcement of the India-Middle East Economic Corridor as a possible reason for Hamas attacking Israel while addressing a joint press conference at the White House. This claim was denied by the White House as well. One can read the fact-check here.

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The old video of protesters scaling a fence on the Israel-Lebanon border discussed before was used by ABP News in the backdrop of the Israel-Palestine war. The report has now been deleted.

Times Now had put out a report claiming that Iranian members of Parliament had chanted the slogans ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘Death to America’ inside the Parliament. The video is actually from 2020 which shows anti-US slogans in the Iran Parliament. (Archive 1, 2)

Propaganda outlets like Sudarshan News and the RSS-run magazine Organizer Weekly have also been fact-checked by Alt News multiple times in the last month, in claims regarding the Israel-Palestine war. Sudarshan News tweeted a video showing five children being held prisoner in cages allegedly by Hamas militants. In reality, the video was uploaded in January 2020 on YouTube. Moreover, the cameraperson in the viral video can be heard laughing in the background. A more plausible scenario is that the father found his children playing inside chicken cages and he locked it to take a funny video. Sudarshan News has not taken their tweet down despite being fact-checked.

Organiser Weekly also amplified the 2021 Russia Today Arabic report on the tunnel network in Gaza, linking it to the ongoing crisisl. They also tweeted a 2022 video with the claim that Hamas supporters in Sweden resorted to violence amid the ongoing war. One can read the fact check here.

Related

Para leer en español, vea esta traducción de Google Translate.

Summary

In the last Republican presidential primary debate of 2023, the candidates argued over their positions on gender-affirmation surgery, legal immigration and more:

• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis cherry-picked comments from Nikki Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to claim she did not oppose “gender mutilation for minors.” Haley has said children should not be allowed to undergo a “gender-changing procedure” until they are at least 18 years old.

• Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy said it was “false” for Haley to claim that she “never said government should … require” social media users to disclose their names. Haley did initially suggest that all social media users should be required to use their names online, before later clarifying that only Americans should be allowed to post anonymously.

• Haley wrongly accused DeSantis of supporting a Florida bill that would have required political bloggers to register with the state. He actually said at the time that he didn’t support the bill, and it later died in committee.

• DeSantis claimed Haley said “there should be no limits on legal immigration.” She didn’t. She said it should be based on “merit,” not “a quota.”

• Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie disputed that he backed guidelines supporting transgender students against the wishes of parents. Christie signed a law providing wide-ranging protections for transgender students, but specific guidelines regarding parental consent were issued after he left office.

• Ramaswamy wrongly said that Haley was “bankrupt when you left the U.N.”

• DeSantis falsely claimed that “there was no data to support” the Food and Drug Administration’s authorization of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines for 6-month-old babies. Both Pfizer and Moderna tested lower-dose versions of their vaccines for young children in clinical trials.

• Ramaswamy embraced the baseless conspiracy theory that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was an “inside job.”

• Ramaswamy repeated claims he has made before about climate change and transgender people.

The Dec. 6 debate was hosted by NewsNation and held in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Analysis

DeSantis Distorts Haley’s Position on Gender-Affirmation Surgery for Minors

DeSantis claimed that Haley opposed a bill he signed prohibiting gender-affirming surgeries — or as he put it, “gender mutilation” — for minors. That’s a distortion of Haley’s position. Haley has said any “permanent change” for transgender people should only be allowed after a child has turned 18.

DeSantis raised the issue twice in the debate, both times leading to fiery exchanges in which Haley said DeSantis was distorting her position and DeSantis insisted he had video evidence to back up his claim.

DeSantis: I did a bill in Florida to stop the gender mutilation of minors. It’s child abuse and it’s wrong. She opposes that bill. She thinks it’s fine and the law shouldn’t get involved with it. If you’re not willing to stand up for the kids, if you’re not willing to stand up and say that it is wrong to mutilate these kids, then you’re not going to fight for the people back home. I will fight for you and I will win for you. …

She didn’t respond to the criticism. It wasn’t about the parents rights education bill. It was about prohibiting sex change operations on minors. They do puberty blockers, these are irreversible. … That is what Nikki Haley opposed. She said the law shouldn’t get involved in that. And I just asked you if you’re somebody that’s going to be the president of the United States and you can’t stand up against child abuse, how are you going to be able to stand up for anything?

Haley: I never said that.

DeSantis: That is the truth.

Haley: I never said that.

DeSantis: We have it on video.

Haley: I said that if you have to be 18 to get a tattoo, you should have to be 18 to have anything done to change your gender.

Later in the debate, DeSantis again raised the issue.

DeSantis: As a parent you do not have the right to abuse your kids. … This is mutilating these minors, these are irreversible procedures. … I signed legislation in Florida banning the mutilation of minors because it is wrong. We cannot allow this to happen in this country. … Nikki disagrees with me. She opposes the bill that we did to ban that, she said the law shouldn’t get involved with it.

Haley: I did not.

In May, DeSantis signed into law a bill that prohibited “sex-reassignment prescriptions and procedures for patients younger than 18 years of age.” The ban includes both surgeries as well as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

The video evidence DeSantis cites to back up his claim about Haley is an interview she did with CBS News on June 5, but he’s cherry-picking her response. In the interview, CBS News’ Tony Dokoupil asked Haley “what care should be on the table when a 12-year-old child in this country assigned female at birth says, ‘actually I feel more comfortable living as a boy.’ What should the law allow the response to be?”

“I think the law should stay out of it and I think parents should handle it. This is a job for the parents to handle,” Haley said. “And then when that child becomes 18, if they want to make more of a permanent change, they can do that. But I think up until then, we see with our teenage kids, they go through a lot during puberty. They go through a lot of confusion, they go through a lot of anxiety, they go through a lot of pressures. We should support them the whole way through, but we don’t need to go and enforce something in schools. We don’t need schools sitting there hiding from the parents what gender pronoun they are using. We don’t need to have those conversations in schools. Those are conversations that should be had at home.”

A super PAC backing DeSantis also cited to us comments Haley made in a June 4 CNN town hall when speaking on the transgender issue. “I want everybody to live the way they want to live,” Haley said. “Let’s get them the help, the therapy, whatever they need so that they can feel better and not be suicidal.”

In neither case did Haley advocate gender-affirming procedures for minors.

In fact, in a May 3 interview with ABC News, Haley specifically said, “You shouldn’t allow a child to have a gender-changing procedure until the age of 18 when they are an adult.”

Haley on IDing Social Media Users

Moderator Megyn Kelly asked Haley to “speak to the requirement that you said that every anonymous internet user needs to out themselves.”

Haley said her original comments, made in a Nov. 14 “Voters’ Voices” segment on Fox News, were that “social media companies need to show us their algorithms.” She added, “I also said there are millions of bots on social media right now. They’re foreign, they’re Chinese, they’re Iranian. I will always fight for freedom of speech for Americans. We do not need freedom of speech for Russians and Iranians and Hamas.”

When Ramaswamy accused Haley of misrepresenting her original remarks, Haley went on to say that she believes social media companies have to “fight back on all of these bots that are happening” and that social media “would be more civil” if people had to include their names alongside their online comments.

“But having said that, I never said government should go and require anyone’s name,” she said.

Ramaswamy called her response “false,” and DeSantis also jumped in to say that Haley had said one of her first acts as president would be to ask for people’s names on social media.

In that Fox News interview, when responding to an audience question, Haley did suggest that all social media users should be required to identify themselves. (Her response starts at about 5:07 in the video.)

Haley, Nov. 14: When I get into office, the first thing we have to do, social media accounts — social media companies, they have to show America their algorithms. Let us see why they are pushing what they are pushing.

The second thing is, every person on social media should be verified by their name. That’s, first of all, it’s a national security threat. When you do that, all of a sudden people have to stand by what they say and it gets rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots and the Chinese bots. And then you’re going to get some civility, when people know their name is next to what they say, and they know their pastor and their family members are going to see it. It’s going to help our kids and it’s going to help our country.

After there was a backlash to her comments, including from some of her GOP primary opponents, Haley, in a Nov. 15 CNBC interview, added a caveat about allowing anonymous online posting by Americans only.

“I want freedom of speech for Americans,” she said. “I don’t want freedom of speech for Russia and Hamas. And that is what is happening right now. And so the way you fix that is, we need our social media companies to verify everybody so that we can get all of those bots out.”

When CNBC’s Joe Kernen asked if Haley was “really saying that people can’t tweet anonymously,” she said she had no issue with Americans doing so.

“I mean, do I think life would be more civil if we were able to do that? Yes. … You should stand by what you say,” she said. “But … I don’t mind anonymous American people having free speech. What I don’t like is anonymous Russians and Chinese and Iranians having free speech.”

That’s different from what she first said on Fox News.

Haley Wrong on DeSantis Support for Blogger Registration

Haley claimed that DeSantis had said “bloggers should have to register with the state if they’re going to talk about or write about elected officials.”

“Check your newspaper, it was absolutely there,” she said, suggesting that there was evidence of DeSantis’ support for the measure.

But there isn’t.

Here’s what happened:

Jason Brodeur, a Republican in the Florida Senate, introduced a bill in late February that would have required “bloggers” to register with the government if they were being paid to write about elected officials.

“If a blogger posts to a blog about an elected state officer and receives, or will receive, compensation for that post, the blogger must register with the appropriate office,” the bill said.

The bill didn’t get much traction and died in committee in May.

But there was a brief flap over the bill in March, and some news outlets ran articles with pictures of DeSantis and references to him in their headlines. The New Republic, for example, published a story with the headline: “Florida GOP Bill Would Require Bloggers Who Write About Ron DeSantis to Register With the State.”

We couldn’t find any news stories reporting that DeSantis had supported the bill, but articles with a photo of the governor that mention him in the headline might give the impression that he was supportive.

Actually, though, a spokesman for DeSantis told the Tampa Bay Times on March 3 that the governor would “consider the merits of a bill in final form if and when it passes the Legislature.”

Then, at a press conference on March 7, DeSantis distanced himself further, saying, “Every person in the legislature can file bills, right? I see these people filing bills, and then there’s articles with my face on the article saying that … bloggers are going to have to register for the state and it’s, like, attributing it to me. And I’m like, OK, that’s not anything that I’ve ever supported, I don’t support.”

“I don’t control every single bill that’s been filed,” DeSantis said.

Fact-checkers at the Associated Press and Reuters addressed this issue at the time.

So, Haley was wrong about DeSantis’ support for the measure, and there have been news articles about the issue since March.

DeSantis Distorts Haley Comment on Immigration

In yet another disagreement on Haley’s policy positions, DeSantis claimed she had said “there should be no limits on legal immigration and that corporate CEOs should set the policy.” Haley interjected, “That’s not true.”

DeSantis, who has made this claim before, is distorting Haley’s comment. She didn’t say there should be “no limits”; she said legal immigration should be based on “merit” rather than a quota.

At a Nov. 2 town hall in New Hampshire, Haley said: “So for too long, Republican and Democrat presidents dealt with immigration based on a quota. We’ll take X number this year. We’ll take X number next year. The debate is on the number. It’s the wrong way to look at it. We need to do it based on merit. We need to go to our industries and say: ‘What do you need that you don’t have?’ So think agriculture, think tourism, think tech. We want the talent that’s going to make us better. Then you bring people in that can fill those needs.”

The U.S. has an “alphabet soup of visa categories” for legal immigration, the Migration Policy Institute explains. “Family relationships, ties to employers, or the need for humanitarian protection are the top channels for immigrants seeking temporary or permanent U.S. residence. And to a lesser extent, people can come if they possess sought-after skills or are selected in the green-card lottery. Visa categories have varying requirements, are subject to different numerical caps, and offer differing rights and responsibilities,” MPI says.

Christie Spins His Support of Transgender Students

Moderator Kelly asked Christie about his support for transgender students against the wishes of parents while he was governor of New Jersey. Christie did sign a bill in 2017 providing protections for transgender students. But the specific guidelines were not issued until after he left office.

“When you were governor in 2017, you signed a law that required new guidelines for schools dealing with transgender students. Those guidelines required schools to accept a child’s preferred gender identity, even if the minor’s parents objected,” Kelly said. “And it said there is no duty for schools to notify parents if their son or daughter changes their gender identity, allowing the serious issue to remain a secret between the school and the child. How is any of that pro-parental rights?”

Christie responded, “That’s simply not true. That law was put into effect in 2018 and regulated in 2018, after I was out of office. … We did not issue those guidelines and you’re wrong about that, simply wrong.” He added, “I stood up every single time for parents to be able to make the decisions for their minor children.”

Christie, who served as New Jersey governor from 2010 to 2018, signed a law in July 2017 that required the state’s education commissioner to develop guidelines to provide protections for transgender students. But the guidelines themselves were issued in late September 2018, after Christie had left office.

The law, NJ S3067, said the guidelines would “provide direction for schools in addressing common issues concerning the needs of transgender students, and to assist schools in establishing policies and procedures that ensure a supportive and nondiscriminatory environment for transgender students.”

The law said the guidelines should address “confidentiality and privacy concerns, including ensuring that school personnel do not disclose information that may reveal a student’s transgender status except as allowed by law, and advising schools to work with the student to create an appropriate confidentiality plan regarding the student’s transgender or transitioning status.”

At the time, Christian Fuscarino, executive director of Garden State Equality, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, said the organization was “pleasantly surprised” by Christie’s signing of the transgender student bill. Christie had previously said policies concerning transgender students should be decided by school districts, and he didn’t support statewide “edicts” on the matter, Politico reported.

The guidelines issued in September 2018 said, “A school district shall accept a student’s asserted gender identity; parental consent is not required.”

Ramaswamy’s ‘Reasonable Peace Deal’ for Ukraine

Christie derided Ramaswamy’s plan for ending Russia’s war in Ukraine, saying it would concede to Russia “all the land they’ve already stolen” and keep Ukraine from joining NATO (although Christie misspoke, saying the plan would keep Ukraine out of Russia). In exchange, Christie said, Ramaswamy would trust Russian President Vladimir Putin “not to have a relationship with China.”

Ramaswamy shot back, “That’s not my deal.”

But it seems to be a mostly accurate synopsis of what Ramaswamy had proposed in June and refers to as the “reasonable peace deal.”

Ramaswamy appeared on the June 1 episode of Kim Iversen’s podcast, which has a history of promoting conspiracy theories. There, he gave a preview of his proposed peace deal, which he then rolled out during a speech in New Hampshire.

“Here’s the deal that we can do with Putin,” Ramaswamy said in his speech. “We will stop providing aid to Ukraine; we will freeze the current lines of control, that means he gets the Donbas region, it means he gets the Crimea; and we will make a permanent commitment to tell Ukraine that you will not be admitted to NATO — not now, not ever. Those are big concessions to Russia. But we have a big ask in return — that you will exit your treaty with China.”

The treaty to which he is referring is the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation Between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation, which was first signed in 2001 and extended in 2021.

According to a paper from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the agreement followed a border dispute and “set forth a bilateral relationship based on ‘mutual respect of sovereignty and territorial integrity,’ noninterference in internal affairs, equality, and mutual benefit.” 

So, it’s true that Ramaswamy had proposed a plan to end the war in Ukraine by allowing Russia to keep all the land it has taken and preventing Ukraine from joining NATO. Christie was less clear — but broadly accurate — when he described what Russia would have to give up in exchange, although Christie clearly would not trust Putin to end Russia’s relationship with China.

Haley Wasn’t ‘Bankrupt’ When Leaving the U.N.

While making an allegation that Haley is “corrupt,” Ramaswamy wrongly said that Haley was “bankrupt when you left the U.N.”

Ramaswamy: Nikki, you were bankrupt when you left the U.N. After you left the U.N. you became a military contractor. You actually started joining service on the board of Boeing whose back you scratched for a very long time and then gave foreign multinational speeches like Hillary Clinton is and now you’re a multimillionaire. That math does not add up. It adds up to the fact that you are corrupt.

Like a lot of politicians, Haley went on the lecture circuit after leaving office, and joined the board of a major corporation, in her case the Boeing Company. But she said she and her husband did not go bankrupt.

“First of all, we were not bankrupt when I left the U.N.,” Haley said. “We’re people of service. My husband is in the military, and I served our country as U.N. ambassador and governor. It may be bankrupt to him, but it certainly wasn’t bankrupt to us.”

When Haley left the U.N. after just two years, there was some speculation that she did so for financial reasons. Money Magazine wrote that her 2018 financial disclosure form, which she filed in May 2018 and covered the preceding calendar year, showed she and her husband had a mortgage, credit card debt and a line of credit that put her total indebtedness in the range of $525,000 to $1.1 million.

At the time, Haley’s spokesperson released a statement that said: “Their current debt level is well below $500,000, and it had no bearing whatsoever on Ambassador Haley’s decision to leave her position.”

So, Haley left office with some level of debt, but we could find no evidence that she and her husband filed for bankruptcy.

DeSantis on COVID-19 Vaccines for Young Kids

DeSantis, who has argued against COVID-19 vaccination in Florida, particularly for younger people, falsely claimed that there was no basis for the FDA to authorize the shots for babies.

“You also have the FDA approving an mNRA shot for 6-months-old babies,” he said, incorrectly referring to the mRNA, or messenger RNA, design of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. “There was no data to support that. They’re doing it because Big Pharma will make money.”

The FDA first authorized COVID-19 vaccines on an emergency basis for children down to 6 months on June 17, 2022, based on the results of clinical trials conducted in young children. As is standard for vaccines, the testing in young children followed testing in adults and older children. This step-down approach helps ensure any safety issues are caught first in adults.

For safety, the clinical trials for the Moderna vaccine included about 4,800 vaccinated kids, while the Pfizer trial included about 3,000 vaccinated kids. Both companies tested their vaccines in two age subgroups, one of which was a group for ages 6 months to 2 years.

The primary way the vaccines were evaluated for effectiveness was through a so-called immunobridging approach, in which young children were tested for their antibody responses to the vaccines. If their antibody levels were similar to those of young adults who had received the adult dose, and a similar proportion of children mounted an antibody response, then it is inferred that the vaccine works in younger children. Both vaccines met the criteria for effectiveness using this method.

The companies also reported traditional efficacy numbers for preventing symptomatic disease from their randomized controlled trials.

Reviewing all the information, the FDA concluded that the benefits of the vaccines for young children outweighed the risks. Independent panels of experts advising the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agreed. Subsequent safety monitoring has continued to demonstrate that the vaccines are safe.

Ramaswamy Wrong on Jan. 6

In an attack on federal workers, which he collectively called the “deep state,” Ramaswamy embraced the conspiracy theory that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was an “inside job.”

“[I]f you want somebody who’s going to speak truth to power, then vote for somebody who’s going to speak the truth to you,” he said. “Why am I the only person on the stage, at least, who can say that Jan. 6 now does look like it was an inside job?”

Some conservatives have tried to blame undercover FBI agents for allegedly provoking the pro-Donald Trump crowd to attack the Capitol that day. But there is no evidence of such a government conspiracy, and, as we’ve written, FBI Director Christopher Wray, a Trump appointee, unequivocally denied the claim.

“To the extent that there’s a suggestion, for example, that the FBI’s confidential human sources or FBI employees in some way instigated or orchestrated Jan. 6 — that’s categorically false,” Wray said at a congressional hearing in November 2022.

The simple fact is that a throng of Trump supporters descended on the U.S. Capitol convinced by Trump that the election had been stolen. Trump made false claims about rampant voter fraud months before the Nov. 3, 2020, election, and long after it — including in his falsehood-filled speech at a rally on the day of the riot. (For a timeline, see our article “Road to a Second Impeachment.”)

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blamed Trump for provoking what he called an act of “terrorism” to prevent Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, from certifying Joe Biden as winner of the 2020 election.

“They did this because they’d been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry he lost an election,” McConnell said in a floor speech on Feb. 13, 2021. “Former President Trump’s actions [that] preceded the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty.”

Repeats

• As he did in the second debate — and using a term that some advocacy groups say should be avoided — Ramaswamy incorrectly said that “transgenderism is a mental health disorder.” Being transgender is not a mental illness, but some trans people experience gender dysphoria, which is a diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It refers to intense distress over the mismatch between a person’s sex and their gender identity. According to the American Psychiatric Association, the diagnosis requires “clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.”
• In once again calling “the climate change agenda … a hoax,” Ramaswamy also repeated two of his favorite cherry-picked climate stats — that there’s been a “98% reduction in the climate disaster-related deaths in the last century,” and that eight times as many people currently die of cold temperatures than warm ones. Both statements are true, at least according to some data, but they don’t mean that continuing to warm the planet by burning fossil fuels and emitting greenhouse gases is a good idea. Climate change is expected to have numerous negative impacts, including on human health.

Sources

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Hale Spencer, Saranac and Robert Farley et al. FactCheck.org. “Explaining the Missing Context of Tucker Carlson’s Jan. 6 Presentation.” 10 Mar 2023.

U.S. House. Committee on Homeland Security. Hearing on Global Terror Threats. 15 Nov 2022.

Kiely, Eugene and Lori Robertson et al. “Road to a Second Impeachment.” FactCheck.org. 12 Jan 2021.

U.S. Senate. “Minority Leader McConnell Says President Trump ‘Practically and Morally Responsible’ for January 6 Attack on Capitol.” 13 Feb 2021.

Tausche, Kayla. “Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley is charging a whopping $200,000 per speaking gig.” CNBC. 30 Jan 2019.

“Boeing Nominates Nikki Haley for Election to Board of Directors.” Press release. 26 Feb 2019.

Office of the Historian. “Representatives of the U.S.A. to the United Nations.” Undated, accessed 7 Dec 2023.

Brown, Andrew and Andy Shain. “Nikki Haley lists up to $1 million in debt as she steps down as U.N. ambassador.” The Post and Courier. 9 Oct 2018.

Corellessa, Eric. “Why did Haley quit? The four theories spreading through Washington.” Times of Israel. 11 Oct 2018.

Calfas, Jennifer. “Nikki Haley’s Resignation Puts A Spotlight on Her Debt. Here’s What We Know About Her Money.” Money. 10 Oct 2018.

U.S. Office of Government Ethics. “Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure Report.” 15 May 2018.

DeSantis War Room (@DeSantisWarRoom). “Haley proposes **no limit** on immigration, says her corporate donors should decide how many people come into the US every year. …” X. 29 Nov 2023.

Florida Senate Website. CS/SB 254: Treatments for Sex Reassignment. Accessed 7 Dec 2023.

YouTube.com. CBS News interview with Nikki Haley. 5 Jun 2023.

CNN.com. CNN Transcripts: CNN Town Hall with Nikki Haley. 4 Jun 2023.

YouTube.com. ABC News interview with Nikki Haley. 3 May 2023.

Kiely, Eugene et al. “FactChecking the Second GOP Primary Debate.” FactCheck.org. 28 Sep 2023.

Robertson, Lori et al. “FactChecking the First GOP Debate.” FactCheck.org. 24 Aug 2023.

McDonald, Jessica. “Ramaswamy’s Climate Change Spin.” FactCheck.org. 15 Sep 2023.

McDonald, Jessica and Jaramillo, Catalina. “DeSantis’ Dubious COVID-19 Vaccine Claims.” FactCheck.org. 21 Dec 2022.

McDonald, Jessica. “A Guide to COVID-19 Vaccines for the Youngest Kids.” FactCheck.org. 7 Jul 2022.

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“Vaccine Development – 101.” FDA. Accessed 7 Dec 2023.

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Wilson, Kirby. “Want to get paid to blog about DeSantis? Report earnings to the state, bill says.” Tampa Bay Times. 3 Mar 2023.

DeSantis, Ron. “Governor DeSantis Holds Press Conference on the State of the State.” Rumble. 7 Mar 2023.

Iversen, Kim (@KimIversen). “A Conversation With Vivek Ramaswamy | An Outsider Presidential Candidate With Bold New Ideas.” YouTube. 1 Jun 2023.

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Tat, Linh. “Christie signs bill to extend protections for transgender students.” Politico. 21 Jul 2021.

At a campaign reception in Denver, President Joe Biden distorted some of the facts and the position of his predecessor:

• Biden claimed that the U.S. has the “lowest inflation rate of any major country in the world right now.” As of October, at least Italy and Canada reported lower inflation rates than the U.S.

• The president claimed to have “cut the federal deficit” by making some corporations pay higher taxes. But the deficit in fiscal year 2023, when the tax went into effect, still increased.

• He said that former President Donald Trump “is proposing …. cutting Social Security and Medicare.” But in January, Trump advised Republicans against cutting funding for the Social Security and Medicare programs.

• Biden said Trump’s “plan” was to end the Affordable Care Act, jeopardizing health insurance for 40 million people. But that worst-case-scenario figure is based on Trump not replacing the ACA with anything. He says he would replace it with something — though he has given no details on what that would be.

• The president claimed that 100 million people with preexisting conditions have protections “only” because of the ACA. That’s the case only for those buying insurance on their own; before the ACA, employer plans couldn’t deny a policy based on health conditions.

Biden made his remarks at a private residence on Nov. 28. He repeated some of the same claims in a speech the next day in Pueblo, Colorado. The president has stepped up his campaign appearances recently and has three fundraisers in Massachusetts on Dec. 5.

Inflation

At the Nov. 28 campaign event, Biden said that the U.S. has the “lowest inflation rate of any major country in the world right now.” But that’s not accurate, at least not according to the most recent data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — or the White House’s own calculations.

OECD data as of October 2023 show that Italy and Canada — which are also members of the G7, a group of seven of the world’s most advanced economies — had lower year-over-year inflation rates than the U.S. While the U.S. inflation rate was 3.2% that month, Italy’s was 1.7% and Canada’s was 3.1%.

If the list were expanded to include other “advanced economies,” Denmark (0.1%), Belgium (0.4%), Latvia (2.1%) and Lithuania (2.8%) also had lower rates than the U.S., according to OECD figures as of October.

Even by the White House’s latest figures, Biden’s claim was not exactly right.

Because of differences in how countries calculate inflation rates, the White House Council of Economic Advisers said it “assembles and constructs harmonized inflation data for G7 countries, allowing for more apples-to-apples inflation comparisons.”

But last month the CEA reported that inflation in the U.S. was “among the lowest” of major economies – not the lowest.

“Measured on an apples-to-apples HICP basis to allow global comparisons, both core & headline U.S. inflation were among the lowest in the G7 in September, the latest month with complete G7 data,” the CEA wrote in a Nov. 14 thread on X, the platform once known as Twitter. HICP stands for Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices.

The language is notable because in June, the CEA had said “the U.S. now has the lowest 12-month harmonized inflation in the G7, both for overall and core inflation.”

In his Nov. 29 remarks, Biden also labeled some companies greedy for not lowering prices since inflation has been declining in the U.S.

“Let me be clear: Any corporation that is not passing these savings on to the consumers needs to stop the … price gouging,” Biden said, noting that Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania calls it “Greedflation.”

But a decline in the year-over-year inflation rate doesn’t automatically mean lower prices, as Biden suggested.

As the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis wrote in August, inflation is the increase in the prices of goods and services over time, and deflation occurs when those prices start to go down.

What the U.S. has been experiencing for the last year is known as disinflation, which is when the rate of inflation decreases but prices still go up – just at a slower pace. Prices wouldn’t be expected to go down until the year-over-year inflation rate is below zero, or negative, which has not happened.

Deficits

In his Nov. 28 campaign speech, Biden continued to misleadingly claim that he reduced the deficit, which he attributed to raising taxes on corporations.

“But by making sure they pay that 15% minimum tax, we paid for everything that we’ve proposed,” the president said. “We didn’t increase the debt. We cut the federal deficit. And we have more work to do.”

Biden was referring to the 15% corporate alternative minimum tax that was included in the Inflation Reduction Act that he signed into law in August 2022. As the Congressional Research Service explains, the CAMT “applies to firms with an average of $1 billion or more in profits in any three-year period and to foreign-parented U.S. firms with profits of over $100 million if the aggregated foreign group has over $1 billion in profits.”

The Joint Committee on Taxation did estimate that the tax, which went into effect in January of this year, would reduce federal deficits by more than $222 billion over 10 fiscal years, including by roughly $35 billion in 2023.

But the national debt has continued to increase under Biden, and the final deficit for fiscal 2023, which ended on Sept. 30, increased to roughly $1.7 trillion, or about $320 billion more than the almost $1.4 trillion deficit in fiscal 2022.

In his Nov. 29 remarks, Biden claimed to have reduced the deficit by “over $7 billion,” when he meant to say “over $1 trillion,” according to a White House transcript that corrected the president’s statement.

Deficits have declined from the record of $3.1 trillion in fiscal 2020, before Biden took office. But as we’ve explained, the primary reason that deficits went down by about $350 billion in Biden’s first year, and by another $1.3 trillion in his second, is because of emergency COVID-19 funding that expired in those years.

Budget experts said that if not for more pandemic and infrastructure spending championed by Biden, deficits would have been even lower than they were in fiscal 2021 and 2022.

Social Security and Medicare

Biden also claimed that Trump is pushing to cut Social Security and Medicare, which is the opposite of what Trump has said publicly.

On Nov. 28, Biden said, “Trump is proposing — and the MAGA Republicans — of cutting Social Security and Medicare.” In remarks the next day, the president said making sure that billionaires “pay their taxes” would allow the U.S. “to strengthen the Social Security and Medicare system instead of cutting them” like “Trump and Boebert want to do,” a reference to Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado.

However, in January, when lawmakers were negotiating an increase in the federal debt limit, Trump, in a video message, warned Republicans not to make cuts to those two entitlement programs.

“Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security to help pay for Joe Biden’s reckless spending spree,” he said. “While we absolutely need to stop Biden’s out of control spending, the pain should be borne by Washington bureaucrats, not by hard-working American families and American seniors.”

Some critics argue that Trump’s words cannot be trusted because of his past budget proposals. But on Medicare, those budgets included bipartisan ideas to reduce the growth of spending.

For example, in 2020 we wrote about Democratic claims that Trump’s budget for fiscal 2021 included cuts to Medicare and Social Security. While the proposal called for reductions in future Medicare spending, budget experts said that would not mean cuts in benefits. As for Social Security, we wrote that the budget proposed reductions to the Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs, but not to the Social Security retirement program.

We also wrote in 2019 about Democratic claims that Trump was “once again trying to ransack Medicare” with his budget for fiscal 2020.

In that case, Trump’s budget again called for reducing Medicare spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, largely by lowering payments to providers. In fact, some of Trump’s Medicare proposals were similar to cost-cutting measures that had been proposed by former President Barack Obama.

But Trump’s 2020 budget did propose changing out-of-pocket costs for Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage, which we said would increase costs for some beneficiaries and decrease costs for others.

Scrapping/Replacing Obamacare?

The Affordable Care Act — once again — has become a focal point of the presidential campaign.

After former President Donald Trump posted on social media that Republicans “should never give up” on terminating the ACA, or Obamacare, Biden resurrected talking points about what would happen to insurance coverage and preexisting condition protections if the ACA were repealed. The problem is, Trump claims he would replace the ACA with something else. The problem for Trump is that he hasn’t provided a plan, and he never released one while in office, either.

There’s support for the idea that whatever Trump might advocate wouldn’t be as comprehensive as the ACA and would lead to an increase in the uninsured and fewer protections for those with health conditions. But at the same time, Biden takes advantage of Trump’s vagueness to claim the former president wouldn’t replace the ACA with anything at all.

We’ll go through Biden’s statements and explain what Trump has supported in the past.

In Truth Social posts on Nov. 25 and 29, Trump said he was “seriously looking at alternatives” and would replace the ACA with something “MUCH BETTER.” (He made similar claims as president.) We asked his campaign for more details on what Trump’s health care plan might be, but we haven’t received a response.

Biden broached the subject at his Nov. 28 campaign reception. “Let’s be clear about what the Affordable Care Act means. There are 40 million people in America today who get their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act,” Biden said. “His plan is to throw every one of them off that — that legislation. It would mean the number of uninsured African Americans would go up by 20 percent. Latinos would go up by 15 percent.”

He made the same claims in his speech the next day in Pueblo, Colorado.

The 40 million figure is the number of people who were enrolled, as of early 2023, in insurance plans on the ACA marketplace, or exchanges — where people buy their own coverage, mostly with the help of premium tax credits — and those with Medicaid coverage thanks to the ACA’s Medicaid expansion policies, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. For marketplace plans, the law, which Obama signed in 2010, provides tax credits to those earning between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level. As of February, 91% of the 15.7 million people with marketplace plans qualified for tax credits.

The Medicaid expansion allows adults earning up to 138% of the poverty level to obtain coverage in states that have chosen to participate. Forty states, plus the District of Columbia, have implemented the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, the most recent being North Carolina.

If the ACA were eliminated, the number and rate of the uninsured would increase significantly. Some who would lose coverage could get insurance through another means, but the jump in the uninsured would likely be tens of millions of people. Most of those who got coverage under the Medicaid expansion would likely become uninsured without the law, according to the nonpartisan health policy research group KFF. A 2020 report by the Urban Institute estimated that a net 21.1 million people would become uninsured in 2022 if the ACA were scrapped. At the time, there were fewer Americans with coverage either on the ACA marketplace or through Medicaid expansion, so such an estimate would likely be higher today.

As for Biden’s figures for the increase in the number of the uninsured by race, his campaign pointed to that same Urban Institute report. It found much larger percentage increases for the uninsured rates. If the ACA were eliminated, the report said, the uninsured rate for Black Americans would increase from 11% to 20%, and for Hispanic people from 21% to 30%.

As we said, Trump claims he would replace the ACA, but he hasn’t said with what. He hasn’t released his own health care plan, but Republican bills he supported in 2017 would have increased the number of people without health insurance by millions, as we’ve explained before. One GOP House bill would have led to 24 million more uninsured by 2026, according to an analysis at the time by the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation. The House passed that bill, but it failed in the Senate, despite both chambers being controlled by Republicans then.

In 2017, Trump also supported a so-called “skinny” repeal bill in the Senate, which would have sent a placeholder bill, with only some changes to the ACA, to a conference committee with the House. The House and Senate would have had to agree upon final legislation. But that bill, which also would have increased the number of people without insurance, failed, too.

In a court case challenging the constitutionality of the ACA, the Trump administration argued the entire law should be nullified. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in 2021 that the plaintiffs lacked standing.

In a June 2019 interview with ABC News, while that lawsuit was working its way through the courts, Trump said he would be releasing a health care plan to replace Obamacare “in about two months.” But that didn’t happen.

Trump’s record indicates he would likely support a replacement that would lead to fewer Americans having health insurance, and it raises questions about whether Trump will release a health care plan. But the Biden campaign fills in the blanks to claim Trump has a “plan” to get rid of the ACA without anything in its place.

Protections for Those with Preexisting Conditions

Biden repeated a misleading talking point about the ACA’s preexisting condition protections.

“There are over 100 million people today who have — who have protections against preexisting conditions only for one reason: because of the Affordable Care Act. Trump wants to get rid of it,” Biden said at the campaign reception.

As we explained a few times during the 2020 campaign, the 100 million figure is an estimate of how many Americans not on Medicare or Medicaid have preexisting conditions. The ACA instituted sweeping protections for those with preexisting conditions, prohibiting insurers in all markets from denying coverage or charging more based on health status. But only those buying their own plans on the individual or nongroup market would immediately be at risk of being denied insurance.

Even without the ACA, employer plans couldn’t deny issuing a policy — and could only decline coverage for some preexisting conditions for a limited period if a new employee had a lapse in coverage.

As of 2022, 20 million people, or about 6.3% of the U.S. population, got coverage on the individual market. It is the case that the ACA’s broad protections would benefit people who lost their jobs or retired early and found themselves seeking insurance on their own.

As for Trump, he has said he supports preexisting condition protections, but while in office, he worked to reduce the protections under the ACA in several ways, as we’ve written before. In the lawsuit mentioned above, the Trump administration initially argued that the ACA’s preexisting condition provisions would have to go if the suit were successful. The administration later backed the full invalidation of the law.

The 2017 GOP bill Trump supported would have included some, but not all, of the ACA’s protections. Trump also pushed the expansion of cheaper short-term health plans that wouldn’t have to abide by the ACA’s protections, including prohibitions against denying or pricing coverage based on health status.

In late September 2020, less than two months before Election Day, Trump signed an executive order that said “[i]t has been and will continue to be the policy of the United States … to ensure that Americans with pre-existing conditions can obtain the insurance of their choice at affordable rates.” He said the order put the issue of preexisting conditions “to rest.”

But it didn’t. At the time, Karen Pollitz, who was then a senior fellow at KFF, told us the order was “aspirational” and had “no force of law.”

With this issue, too, Trump doesn’t have a plan that can be evaluated — and his record indicates he could support a plan that weakens the preexisting condition protections in the ACA. But Biden’s talking point suggests no plan means no protections, and it glosses over the fact that even without the ACA, employer policies still wouldn’t be able to deny insurance.

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and California Gov. Gavin Newsom — who head two of the largest states in the country — squared off in a debate on Nov. 30 on Fox News. The governors spun, mangled and exaggerated some of the facts on issues including COVID-19, migration, abortion, book bans and gasoline prices.

The debate, which was moderated by Sean Hannity, was billed as “The Great Red State vs. Blue State Debate.” But it wasn’t a preview of the 2024 presidential election. DeSantis is currently trailing former President Donald Trump in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination, while Newsom has ruled out challenging President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination.

Florida’s COVID-19 Restrictions

In a lively exchange on COVID-19 mitigation measures in Florida, Newsom accused DeSantis of initially supporting restrictions “until he decided to fall prey to the fringe of his party.” During that exchange, DeSantis claimed that Newsom was wrong about DeSantis closing beaches and imposing quarantines — but in both instances the California governor was right.

Newsom: You closed down your beaches, your bars, your restaurants.

DeSantis: False.

Newsom: It’s a fact.

DeSantis: The beaches were not closed.

Newsom: You had quarantines.

DeSantis: False.

Newsom: You had quarantines. You had checkpoints all over the state of Florida. By the way, I didn’t say that. Donald Trump laid you out on this. Dead to rights. You did that. You followed science, you followed [Dr. Anthony] Fauci.

DeSantis: That’s not true.

It’s true that DeSantis resisted closing beaches and issuing stay-at-home orders, but he did both in orders that were crafted in a limited way. He also directed the Florida Department of Transportation, or FDOT, to set up checkpoints in an attempt to enforce an order requiring travelers entering Florida from the New York state area to isolate for 14 days. 

Here’s a brief timeline of events that shows how DeSantis issued a series of increasingly restrictive executive orders to slow the spread of COVID-19.  

The Florida governor issued executive order 20-68 on March 17, 2020, directing public beaches to restrict “gatherings to no more than 10 persons” and urging beachgoers to “support beach closures at the discretion of local authorities.”

On March 30, 2020, DeSantis signed an executive order (20-89) directing four counties in South Florida to restrict public access to “non-essential” businesses. Over the following two days, he issued two executive orders: The first (20-90) ordered beaches to be closed in Broward and Palm Beach counties, and the second (20-91) ordered senior citizens and those with a “significant underlying medical condition” statewide to stay at home. The Tampa Bay Times said that DeSantis had – up until that point — resisted issuing a statewide stay-at-home order.

The April 1, 2020, order, the Tampa Bay Times wrote, “does not mandate any business shut down,” but “it severely restricts the movement of employees and customers and many non-essential stores and offices will likely chose to temporarily close. Businesses are encouraged to telework and restaurants to provide food via drive-thru, take out or delivery.”

As for checkpoints, DeSantis issued an executive order (20-82) on March 24, 2020, ordering people entering Florida from Connecticut, New Jersey and New York “to isolate or quarantine for a period of 14 days.” He followed that up three days later with another executive order (20-86) directing FDOT to set up “appropriate checkpoints, including at welcome centers and rest stops,” and requiring travelers from those states and others areas “with substantial community spread” to fill out forms at the checkpoints disclosing “the address of their location of isolation or quarantine for a period of 14 days.”

Californians Moving to Florida

Both governors sought to portray their states as a more desirable place to live. DeSantis emphasized Florida’s relative low overall crime rate and taxes, while Newsom countered by touting the state’s low murder rate and a progressive tax system that benefits low- and moderate-income taxpayers.

Asked by Hannity to explain why California residents are moving to Florida, Newsom said: “You mean the last two years, more Floridians going to California than Californians going to Florida?” Newsom added, “That’s going to be fun to fact-check.”

The facts, however, show that Newsom is wrong to suggest that California has seen a two-year net increase in migration of residents moving between the two states.

According to Census Bureau migration data for 2022, 50,701 Florida residents had been living in California the year prior, and 28,557 Californians had been living in Florida – a net gain for Florida and a net loss for California of 22,144 residents.

In 2021, 37,464 Florida residents had been living in California the year prior, and 24,692 California residents had been living in Florida – a net gain for Florida and a net loss for California of 12,772, Census data show.

That’s a two-year net gain for Florida of 34,916 new residents.

California Gasoline Prices

For a variety of reasons, including higher state taxes and clean fuel mandates, California typically has among the highest gasoline prices in the United States. But DeSantis left the misleading impression that the state’s gasoline prices are currently $7 per gallon.

The issue of gasoline prices came up when Newsom was making a point about California’s progressive tax rate. DeSantis interjected, “How does paying $7 a gallon gas help working people?”

Gasoline prices fluctuate, and prices have reportedly topped $7 a gallon at some individual stations in the state, from time to time. But currently, the statewide average for regular gasoline in California is less than $5.

As of Dec. 1, a gallon of regular gasoline cost $4.83 in California, which is the highest in the country, according to AAA. The least expensive gasoline is in Texas, where the average is $2.75 a gallon. In addition to Texas, 27 other states have lower gasoline prices than Florida ($3.16 a gallon).

Book Bans in Florida

As governor, DeSantis signed laws that, according to PEN America, “bar instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade (HB 1557), prohibit educators from discussing advantages or disadvantages based on race (HB 7), and mandate that schools must catalog every book on their shelves, including those found in classroom libraries (HB 1467). Due to the lack of clear guidance, these three laws have each led teachers, media specialists, and school administrators to proactively remove books from shelves, in the absence of any specific challenges.” 

During the debate, Newsom said “1,406 books have been banned just last year under Ron DeSantis’ leadership” – which is not quite right. PEN America reported that during the 2022–23 school year, there were 1,406 “instances of books banned” in Florida schools. Some of the books on the list are duplicates, such as Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s first book, “Bluest Eye,” which is listed as being banned in 12 Florida schools or school districts.

Newsom also asked, “What’s wrong with Amanda Gorman’s [poem]?” – referring to “The Hill We Climb,” which Gorman read at Joe Biden’s inauguration. Newsom suggested that her poem was banned, and it is true that it is on PEN America’s list of banned books.

But, as we wrote, Gorman’s poem was not banned. In one K-8 school in Miami-Dade County, the book was moved to a shelf for upper-grade students. The school said, “The book is available in the media center as part of the middle grades collection,” meaning sixth through eighth grades.

Florida’s Abortion Ban

In April, DeSantis signed legislation, known as the Heartbeat Protection Act, that banned abortion in Florida after six weeks of gestation. A year earlier, DeSantis signed a bill that banned most abortions after 15 weeks.

During a discussion on abortion, Hannity asked DeSantis about his reason for signing legislation instituting a six-week ban after he had already signed similar legislation prohibiting abortion after 15 weeks. In his response, DeSantis said of the six-week ban: “That bill attaches when there is a detectable heartbeat for the child.”

That is inaccurate for a couple of reasons. For the first 10 weeks, the correct medical term is “embryo,” not fetus or, as DeSantis said, “child.” Also, as we have written before, a heartbeat isn’t audible at six weeks.

“What is interpreted as a heartbeat in these bills is actually electrically-induced flickering of a portion of the fetal tissue that will become the heart as the embryo develops,” the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said in a statement to us in 2019. “Thus, ACOG does not use the term ‘heartbeat’ to describe these legislative bans on abortion because it is misleading language, out of step with the anatomical and clinical realities of that stage of pregnancy.”

For more, read our Ask SciCheck “When Are Heartbeats Audible During Pregnancy?”

Abortion Ban, Again

Newsom repeatedly claimed that the six-week abortion ban signed by DeSantis in Florida “criminalizes women” who seek abortions. Although he did not respond to that point in the debate, DeSantis has made repeated public statements that that is not the meaning or intent of the law he signed in April.

Newsom and other Democrats have seized on the language of the new law, which would make it a felony for “[a]ny person who willfully performs, or actively participates in, a termination of pregnancy” after six weeks of gestation. They say the inclusion of anyone who “actively participates” might subject women getting an abortion to criminal charges.

As we wrote last month when this issue was raised in an ad from a political action committee tied to Newsom, DeSantis has repeatedly said he does not support penalties against women who get abortions. In an interview with Norah O’Donnell on “CBS Evening News” on Sept. 13, DeSantis said the law he signed — which includes an exception for mothers whose lives are at risk, and delays the abortion ban to 15 weeks for pregnancy caused by rape, incest or human trafficking — only includes criminal penalties for medical providers who perform abortions beyond the deadlines in the law, not the women who get abortions. “We’ve litigated this,” DeSantis said.

In the case of Florida v. Ashley, an unwed Florida teenager was prosecuted for manslaughter and third-degree murder after she shot herself in the abdomen while in the third trimester of pregnancy. She survived, but the fetus did not. The state Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that she could not be criminally prosecuted.

The court noted that the penalty section of a 1993 Florida law limiting abortions in the third trimester stated, “Any person who willfully performs, or participates in, a termination of a pregnancy in violation of the requirements of this section is guilty of a felony of the third degree․” In its opinion, the state Supreme Court noted that “in order to overturn a long standing common law principle,” the state Legislature would have had to enact a statute that explicitly criminalized women who got an abortion in violation of the state statute. “Florida has not done so,” the court wrote.

So, since 1997, Florida has had similar language in its abortion laws, and no women getting abortions in violation of those state laws have been criminally prosecuted.

Nonetheless, on Sept. 15, Florida Senate Democratic Leader Lauren Book filed a bill citing ambiguity in the wording of the new law and proposing changes to it to make clear that women getting an abortion cannot be criminally charged. The DeSantis campaign did not respond when we asked if the governor would support Book’s bill.

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A TV ad from a super PAC backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the Republican presidential primary uses out-of-context quotes from Nikki Haley to misleadingly claim that Hillary Clinton, the former Democratic presidential nominee, is Haley’s “role model.”

The ad also says in words on the screen, “Nikki’s not who she says,” but the comments it refers to are no secret. In numerous interviews over the years, Haley — a former governor of South Carolina and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations — has told the story of how something Clinton said long ago about not listening to naysayers convinced Haley to first run for public office in South Carolina. She did not make the decision because she shared Clinton’s politics, as the ad may lead viewers to believe.

In fact, the ad uses clips that were edited to omit parts of those interviews where Haley said she does not agree with Clinton on “anything” or “a lot.”

Fight Right Inc., a group recently formed to support DeSantis, has spent more than $200,000 to air the anti-Haley ad in Iowa since Nov. 23, according to AdImpact, a service that tracks political advertising. The Iowa caucuses, the first nominating contest in the Republican presidential primary, will be held Jan. 15.

2020 Interview

The ad begins with a narrator saying of Clinton, “We know her as ‘Crooked Hillary,’ but to Nikki Haley she’s her role model, the reason she ran for office.”

It then plays several clips of Haley talking about how Clinton motivated Haley’s first campaign nearly two decades ago. But the clips have been edited to exclude the context in which Haley made those remarks.

To start, the ad shows Haley stating in choppy fashion, “I often say that the reason I got into politics … was because of Hillary Clinton.” That comes from a July 2020 interview in which Haley recalled how she was considering running for South Carolina’s House of Representatives in 2003, when something Clinton told the audience at a Furman University-sponsored event that Haley attended that fall helped her make up her mind.

But the ad cuts out the part where Haley indicated that she and Clinton “don’t agree” politically. Here are Haley’s fuller remarks, which were made in the context of encouraging more women to seek political office (emphasis is ours):

Haley, July 2020: You know I often say that the reason I got into politics, believe it or not — I don’t agree with anything that she has to say — but was because of Hillary Clinton. I was at a Furman Institute event for women and she was the one that said for all the reasons people tell you, you shouldn’t run, those are the reasons you should. And I walked out of there and decided to run for the statehouse.

2012 Interview

Haley had previously talked about this in a 2012 interview with David Gregory, who was then the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Clips of that interview, in which Haley was promoting her book “Can’t Is Not an Option: My American Story,” also are shown in the ad.

When prompted by Gregory, who said that Haley had written about Clinton being a “big inspiration” to her, Haley mentioned how Clinton’s 2003 remarks had convinced her to start her political career despite others who had advised against it.

But the ad ignores the fuller explanation, including Gregory suggesting that Clinton had not inspired Haley “ideologically.”

Here’s more of the exchange between Haley and Gregory:

Haley, April 2012: I decided to run for the statehouse. Everybody immediately told me I shouldn’t do it. I was too young, you can’t do it with two small kids, you should start at the school board level. And one day I went with my friend Eleanor Kitzman to a Furman leadership program where Hillary Clinton was speaking and she said to a few hundred people, there are going to be tons of reasons why people tell you, you can’t do something, and she said and that’s the reason you absolutely have to. And I walked out of there and I said I’m running for office.

Gregory: So she was an inspiration, maybe not ideologically, but certainly in terms of a leader.

Haley: A strong woman that understood that people are quick to say no you can’t and that’s all the more reason why you have to push through it. I needed to show that moms can do this. I needed to show that wives can do this. I needed to show that age was not a limitation, or gender, or being Indian. And so it was proving as much to myself as it was everyone else. So, I appreciate her saying it. She said it at a time that was very important in my life.

2019 Interview

Haley told the story again in November 2019, when promoting another one of her books, at an event moderated by Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa.

That’s when Haley said of Clinton, “she is actually the reason that I made the jump” — which is another clip shown in the ad.

But the ad excludes Haley also saying she “may not agree with her on a lot of things,” which she said just prior to the line the ad highlighted.

Haley brought up Clinton in response to an audience member’s question on “what led you to conservatism.” 

Haley said when she decided to run for South Carolina’s House of Representatives in 2003, she was considering if she would do so as a Republican or Democrat. It was after a conversation with a friend about the role of government that she realized she was a Republican, she said.

But in linking Haley to Clinton, the ad could mislead viewers about Haley’s politics.

“Nikki Haley credited Hillary Clinton with saying young women shouldn’t listen to critics who tell them not to run for office, but that’s where the praise ended,” Haley presidential campaign spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas told NBC News for a story about the ad.

“Haley has long said she doesn’t agree with Clinton on anything, and she’d be a disastrous president,” Perez-Cubas was quoted saying.

Fight Right leaves out the parts of Haley’s past interviews that would make her stance on Clinton’s politics clear to those who watch the ad.

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Para leer en español, vea esta traducción de Google Translate.

Quick Take

At least 260 people were killed by Hamas during the militant group’s surprise attacks at an outdoor music festival in Israel on Oct. 7. A video clip on social media falsely claims to show Israel Defense Forces helicopters firing on festival-goers that day. The clip is from a video of IDF aircraft shooting at Hamas militants a day later at sites in the Gaza Strip.

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Full Story

During the Oct. 7 surprise attacks on Israel by the Palestinian militant group Hamas, at least 260 people were killed at an outdoor concert, the Tribe of Nova music festival near Kibbutz Reim, as we’ve written.

About 240 Israelis and other nationals were taken hostage during the attacks at the festival and other locations in southern Israel.

Since war broke out between Israel and Gaza, about 1,200 Israelis and more than 13,000 Palestinians have been killed as of Nov. 20, the United Nations said, citing Israeli official sources and the Gaza Ministry of Health, respectively. The majority of Israeli casualties occurred during Hamas’ initial attacks on Oct. 7.

News reports about the attacks have included video of the aftermath of the violence at the festival and interviews with survivors.

As rockets fell on the festival crowd, the attackers converged on the site in trucks and on motorcycles, firing AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades at the fleeing revelers, according to reporting by the Associated Press based on survivors’ accounts.

But posts on social media, including a Nov. 9 post from conspiracy theorist Stew Peters, falsely claim that a video shows many of the festival-goers were killed by Israeli helicopter fire, not the Hamas attackers.

“VIDEO PROVES and ISRAEL ADMITS it slaughtered its own people on Oct. 7th,” Peters falsely claims in the post on X, the platform formerly called Twitter. “Footage from Israeli helicopter shows the IDF killing many people at October 7 concert in Israel.”

Peters, a conservative radio host, also has spread misinformation about COVID-19 and other topics, as we’ve previously written.

The 14-second video clip in Peters’ post appears to be green-tinted, infrared aerial footage of explosions on the ground and people running from the assault. The text on the post claims, “IDF helicopters fired on civilians fleeing the PsyTrance Music Festival.”

In addition to the video, the post includes a link to an Oct. 30 article in the Middle East Monitor, a website that says it supports the “Palestinian cause.” That article includes a quote that reads: “Israeli commanders made ‘difficult decisions’ including ‘shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.’” The quote is attributed to a security coordinator at Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the settlements attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7. 

But the aerial footage shown in the post comes from a longer compilation video shared by the IDF on Oct. 9 on X. The video shows aerial bombings at several sites in the Gaza Strip on Oct. 8 — the day after the Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7. The text on the IDF post, translated from Hebrew, reads: “Forces @idfonline Throughout the last day, Air Force planes have been carrying out extensive attacks along the length and breadth of the Gaza Strip, wreaking havoc on Hamas terrorists. In just the last three hours, about 130 targets were attacked using dozens of planes. The focus of the attack: Beit Hanon, Sajaya, Al Furkan and Rimal.”

Those locations are in the northern Gaza Strip; two are neighborhoods in Gaza City.

In response to the social media posts, the IDF told Newsweek in a story published Nov. 13: “On October 9, a video was published on the IDF’s official Twitter account describing IDF attacks in the Gaza Strip. The purpose of the strikes was to stop the murderous terrorists from penetrating into Israel to commit brutal and inhumane crimes. The viral post of an airstrike on the Nova festival is fake.”

The French television network France 24 debunked the claims about the video shared on social media in a Nov. 14 broadcast. An analysis cited in that report found that the infrared footage of the helicopter assault was taken at a location 10 kilometers, or six miles, away from the site of the music festival.

News Reports of Possible Friendly Fire

News reports have noted the possibility that Israeli forces fired on Israelis during their response to the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7.

In its Nov. 14 report, France 24 cited media reports that Israeli helicopter pilots had difficulty distinguishing militants from civilians on Oct. 7.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on Nov. 18 that “according to a police source, an investigation into [the attack on the festival] also revealed that an IDF helicopter that arrived on the scene from the Ramat David base fired at the terrorists and apparently also hit some of the revelers who were there.” (The Haaretz article was translated from Hebrew by Google.)

Responding to that report, the Israeli police issued a statement saying its investigation did not focus on IDF operations at the concert site and did not provide “any indication about the harm of civilians due to aerial activity there,” the Times of Israel reported on Nov. 19.

We emailed the media offices of the Israel Defense Forces for an explanation of the video footage shared on social media and a response to the Haaretz report that a helicopter fired at Israelis.

A spokesperson for the IDF North American media desk told us in a Nov. 23 email, “The Israel Police clarifies that the investigation carried out by the Southern District focused on the heroism of the police officers who acted to stop the massacre committed by Hamas.

“Contrary to the misleading publication, the police investigation does not refer to the activity of the IDF forces, and therefore no indication was given of any harm to civilians caused by any aerial activity at the site.

“The preliminary findings of the ongoing national inquiry, spearheaded by law enforcement and communicated to the international media, cast a spotlight on the profound and reprehensible acts committed by Hamas terrorists during the Nova music festival. Any effort to downplay the severity of these atrocities, as depicted in the misleading Haaretz newspaper publication, deserves unequivocal rejection,” the IDF spokesperson said.

We cannot say whether there were any cases of friendly fire by Israeli forces responding to the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7. But the social media posts that claim the IDF video proves “many people” were killed by the IDF at the music festival are false.

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Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

Sources

ABC News. “Hundreds killed at music festival in Israel | GMA.” YouTube. 7 Oct 2023.

Bohannon, Molly. “At Least 260 Killed At Israeli Music Festival In Hamas Attack — Attendees Describe ‘Horror Movie.’” Forbes. 8 Oct 2023.

Breiner, Joshua. “Assessment in the security establishment: Hamas did not know in advance about the Nova festival, and recognized it from the air.” Haaretz. 18 Nov 2023.

Debre, Isabel and Michael Biesecker. “Israeli survivors recount terror at music festival, where Hamas militants killed at least 260.” Associated Press. 9 Oct 2023.

Gal, Shi. “‘Save us’: The Apache pilots who arrived first on the battlefield speak.” N12. 21 Oct 2023.

Gillet, Francesca, and Alice Cuddy. “Israeli music festival: 260 bodies recovered from site where people fled in hail of bullets.” BBC. 9 Oct 2023.

Israel Defense Forces, North American Media Desk. Spokesperson. Email to FactCheck.org. 23 Nov 2023.

Marchant de Abreu, Catalina. “Truth or Fake: Israeli army did not fire on own civilians at Nova music festival.” France 24. 14 Nov 2023.

Media Line (@themedialine). “Survivors From the South: Victims of Hamas’ Terror Speak From Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital.” YouTube. 9 Oct 2023.

Middle East Monitor. “Report: 7 October testimonies strike major blow to Israeli narrative.” 30 Oct 2023.

Norton, Tom. “Fact Check: Does Video Show Israeli Helicopter Shoot Festival Goers?” Newsweek. 13 Nov 2023.

Picheta, Rob. “Shani Louk, 23-year-old kidnapped by Hamas from music festival, declared dead, Israel says.” CNN. 31 Oct 2023.

Spencer, Saranac Hale, and D’Angelo Gore. “What We Know About Three Widespread Israel-Hamas War Claims.” FactCheck.org. Updated 14 Nov 2023.

Times of Israel. “Israel Police slams ‘Haaretz’ claim IDF helicopter may have harmed civilians on Oct. 7.” 19 Nov 2023.

United Nations. “Gaza: ‘Thousands of children killed’ within a few weeks, says UN’s Guterres.” UN News. 20 Nov 2023.

Zeyton, Yoav. “Hamas deception of IDF helicopters and directing pilots on WhatsApp | Air Force on the 1st.” Ynet. 15 Oct 2023.

SciCheck Digest

The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines — like many other vaccines — can contain small amounts of DNA left over from the manufacturing process. There’s no evidence this residual DNA causes “turbo cancer,” or very aggressive cancer. Nor did Moderna admit that “mRNA Jabs Cause Turbo-Cancer,” contrary to an online article that misconstrues a line from a patent application.

How safe are the COVID-19 vaccines?

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Full Story

Vaccines can contain trace amounts of materials left over from their manufacturing process. One of these materials is DNA, which can remain in both mRNA vaccines and a variety of older vaccines. This DNA is expected and considered safe, and there are purification and quality control steps meant to ensure it is present within regulatory limits.

We have covered unsubstantiated claims that residual DNA in mRNA COVID-19 vaccines is considered “adulteration” or integrates into people’s DNA and causes cancer. Representatives from regulatory agencies and various academic experts told us there isn’t reason to believe the small amounts of residual DNA in the mRNA vaccines would integrate into a person’s cellular DNA and cause cancer. And legal experts told us that the residual DNA would not be considered adulteration.

(For more about residual DNA in mRNA vaccines, read our article “COVID-19 Vaccines Have Not Been Shown to Alter DNA, Cause Cancer.”)

In a twist on these claims, recent social media posts shared a headline falsely stating that “Moderna Admits mRNA Jabs Cause Turbo-Cancer” and referencing the residual DNA found in vaccine vials. The headline is from an article published by the People’s Voice, a website with a history of spreading misinformation and publishing false headlines.

As we also have written previously, there isn’t reason to believe the mRNA vaccines cause very aggressive cancer, or “turbo cancer.”

The new false claim, that Moderna has admitted the mRNA vaccines cause turbo cancer, stems from misleading statements made by Dr. Robert Malone, who has spread COVID-19 misinformation in the past. Malone made his remarks during a Nov. 13 event held and livestreamed by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. 

Malone referred to a short section in a Moderna patent application, published in 2019. The patent application is related to RNA vaccines, but the comments Malone highlighted are about DNA vaccines, which remain experimental in the U.S.

In its description of DNA vaccines, the Moderna patent application mentioned some theoretical cancer-related concerns as an example of a drawback of the technology: “With this technique, however, comes potential problems, including the possibility of insertional mutagenesis, which could lead to the activation of oncogenes or the inhibition of tumor suppressor genes.” 

Insertional mutagenesis is a phenomenon in which foreign DNA integrates into a genome, causing changes. The concern the patent application references is that the DNA could integrate in precisely the wrong place in a cell’s DNA and turn on a gene that could contribute to cancer or turn off a gene that helps protect cells from becoming cancerous.

“FDA says they’re not aware of any concerns, but Moderna in its own patent lays out exactly the same concerns that exist about DNA and insertional mutagenesis and genotoxicity,” Malone said. 

But the concerns mentioned in the patent application were about vaccines using DNA as their main ingredient, not residual DNA left over in other types of vaccines. DNA vaccines rely on getting DNA into the nucleus of a cell, where it is transcribed into mRNA, which is used to make protein. The messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccines work by introducing mRNA into the body of a cell, where it serves as instructions for making protein. 

With residual DNA, scientists from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have written that they consider the primary cancer-related concern to be the introduction of DNA encoding an activated cancer-causing gene. There is no residual DNA encoding cancer-causing genes in the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

The patent application also makes clear that even for DNA vaccines, the concern is theoretical. What the line quoted from the patent application does not spell out is that this “potential” concern has not been demonstrated to be a real safety problem, even for DNA vaccines.

In a 2020 review paper on mRNA vaccines, FDA scientists nodded to the theoretical concerns about insertional mutagenesis from DNA vaccines, while making clear they did not consider this risk to have been borne out.

In listing advantages of mRNA vaccines over DNA vaccines, they referred to the absence of the “perceived” risk of DNA integrating into a person’s own DNA. They went on to explain that this was a concern with DNA vaccines in the past, but experiments have shown that the rate of integration was low, “thus lessening the concern for integration.”

In a response sent to us for our prior article on residual DNA in the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, an FDA spokesperson did in fact make reference to past concerns about DNA integration and cancer, while expressing confidence in the mRNA vaccines.

The FDA email said that “with regard to the mRNA vaccines, while concerns have been raised previously as theoretical issues, available scientific evidence supports the conclusion that the minute amounts of residual DNA do not cause cancer or changes to a person’s genetic code.”

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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

“What Ingredients Are in Vaccines?” FactCheck.org. 30 Oct 2023.

McDonald, Jessica. “Posts Falsely Claim FDA ‘Required’ to Take mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines Off Market Due to Adulteration.” FactCheck.org. 3 Nov 2023.

Yandell, Kate. “COVID-19 Vaccines Have Not Been Shown to Alter DNA, Cause Cancer.” FactCheck.org. 26 Oct. 2023.

Amanda (@the_barefoot_truther). “Imagine, cancer from a concoction of poison that was never intended to be injected into your body 🤦🏻‍♀️…” Instagram. 21 Nov 2023.

The Unity Project (@theunityprojectonline and @theunityproject2.0). “Pay attention, the truth is being exposed. Comment the word “truth” if you’d like to read the full article. …” Instagram. 21 Nov 2023.

Adl-Tabatabai, Sean. “Moderna Admits mRNA Jabs Cause Turbo-Cancer; Investigators Find Billions of DNA Fragments in Vials.” The People’s Voice. 18 Nov 2023.

Yandell, Kate. “Posts Share Fabricated Quote on ‘Permanent Climate Lockdowns.’” FactCheck.org. 4 Aug 2023.

Yandell, Kate. “COVID-19 Vaccines Save Lives, Are Not More Lethal Than COVID-19.” FactCheck.org. 6 Nov 2023.

McDonald, Jessica. “Posts Falsely Push Bill Gates-Connected ‘Air’ Vaccine Conspiracy.” FactCheck.org. 13 Oct 2023.

Yandell, Kate. “Ventilators Save Lives, Did Not Cause ‘Nearly All’ COVID-19 Deaths.” FactCheck.org. 1 Jun 2023.

Yandell, Kate. “Posts Share Fake Chelsea Clinton Quote About Global Childhood Vaccination Effort.” FactCheck.org. 10 May 2023.

Yandell, Kate. “COVID-19 Vaccines Have Not Been Shown to Cause ‘Turbo Cancer.’” FactCheck.org. 31 Aug 2023.

“Injuries Caused By COVID-19 Vaccines LIVE Stream.” Marjorie Taylor Greene’s website. Accessed 21 Nov 2023.

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. “Congresswoman MTG Holds Hearing on Injuries Caused by COVID-19 Vaccines with Special Witnesses.” YouTube livestream. 13 Nov 2023.

ModernaTx, Inc. “HPIV3 RNA Vaccines.” United States Patent Application Publication US 2019/0240317 A1. 8 Aug 2019.

Sheng-Fowler, Li et al. “Issues Associated with Residual Cell-Substrate DNA in Viral Vaccines.” Biologicals. 14 Mar 2009.

Naik, Ramachandra, and Peden, Keith. “Regulatory Considerations on the Development of mRNA Vaccines.” mRNA Vaccines, edited by Dong Yu and Benjamin Petsch, Springer International Publishing, 2022, pp. 187–205.