SciCheck Digest

Numerous studies have found that additional COVID-19 shots are generally associated with extra protection against the coronavirus. Many people on social media, however, have shared a preliminary finding from a Cleveland Clinic study and misrepresented it as proving that getting more doses increases a person’s risk of infection.

How effective are the vaccines?

Full Story

COVID-19 vaccines and boosters reduce the risk of severe disease and death. They also offer some protection against infections, although the effectiveness wanes in the months after getting vaccinated, and such effectiveness is lower against the omicron variant, compared with earlier variants of the coronavirus.

An observational study of more than 50,000 Cleveland Clinic staff published recently in Open Forum Infectious Diseases aimed to assess the effectiveness of the bivalent omicron booster against infection between September 2022 and March 2023, a period when 8.7% of the employees tested positive. It concluded the booster provided some protection. The bivalent booster prompts the immune system to recognize both the original spike protein of the virus and the version found on BA.4 and BA.5, the predominant omicron subvariants when it was first rolled out. 

The researchers also noticed that people who got more vaccine doses prior to Sept. 12, 2022 — the day the bivalent booster became available at the Cleveland Clinic — had a higher rate of testing positive in the following months than people who had gotten fewer prior vaccine doses. But the researchers didn’t find that more doses caused a higher risk of infection. Rather, this finding was an association that could be due to multiple other factors. And studies have generally found that each additional vaccine dose reduces COVID-19 risk.

Incorrect claims about the paper have been circulating since before it was peer-reviewed and published. Recently, a widely viewed social media post jumped to the conclusion that the study shows that “a higher number of COVID-19 vaccine doses received increases the risk of infection with COVID-19.” Another widely viewed post sharing the study results incorrectly concluded that the vaccines were a “failed experiment.”

The original COVID-19 vaccine series was initially very effective against infection and without question “saved a lot of lives,” co-author Dr. Nabin Shrestha, an infectious disease physician at the Cleveland Clinic, told us. Determining whether getting more doses of the COVID-19 vaccines can later cause greater susceptibility to infections “wasn’t the point of the study,” he said. 

Shrestha said he did not know the explanation for the findings. The paper mentions immunological mechanisms that “have been suggested as possible mechanisms whereby prior vaccine may provide less protection than expected.” But Shrestha said that the result could also be from a confounding factor — some characteristic of people who got more vaccines that led them to have a higher number of positive tests.

The study said: “The unexpected finding of increasing risk with increasing number of prior COVID-19 vaccine doses needs further study.”

Outside experts doubted that the prior vaccines increased infection risk.

“The data from the study do indeed show that those who have more vaccines have more infections, but this is very unlikely to be causal in nature,” epidemiologist Matthew Fox from Boston University told us in an email.

Deepta Bhattacharya, a professor of immunobiology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, told us via email that the immunological mechanisms mentioned in the paper don’t make “a lot of sense as far as explaining the authors’ results.” He also pointed out that the study is observational — meaning the researchers looked back at data available on Cleveland Clinic staff members rather than randomly assigning people to particular interventions. 

“There are all sorts of confounding variables that can’t all be accounted for (e.g. behavioral differences between groups),” he said. “When the conclusions of an observational study are clearly at odds with the mechanistic immunology, I certainly have doubts about its conclusions.”

“There is no clear or compelling evidence that repeated vaccination with COVID-19 vaccines makes anyone more susceptible or prone to getting COVID-19,” a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spokesperson told us in an email. “The continued use of COVID-19 vaccines among the worldwide population, as well as clinical trial data, show these vaccines are highly effective in preventing the most severe outcomes from a COVID-19 infection including hospitalization and death.”

Findings Have Multiple Possible Explanations

Observational studies like the Cleveland Clinic one can turn up associations between things, but it can be difficult to assess what caused these patterns.

Shrestha said the finding in his study on prior doses and infection risk “should certainly give us some pause.” But he also said that “a study like this, one study, is not going to prove any cause-effect relationship.” The goal in presenting the findings, he said, was to prompt other researchers to also look at the relationship between past doses and infection risk.

Fox said that people who do not get vaccines are “typically not the same” as people who do, and these differences could make one group more likely to get infected or get a positive COVID-19 test. Vaccines were readily available to staff members, according to the paper, and the decision on whether to get them was voluntary. 

Researchers can try to make statistical adjustments for differences between groups, but Fox pointed out that the main graph in the paper showing the relationships between prior vaccine doses and COVID-19 risk — which was shared widely — is unadjusted. He also mentioned that there was no table showing the characteristics of people with different numbers of prior vaccine doses, and that this data is typically helpful for making sure there are proper adjustments for any differences.

Shrestha said he and his co-authors would not have shared the unadjusted graph had they not concluded in the main adjusted analyses that the association held up. But as we said, he agreed there could be some confounding factor explaining the results.

One typical difference, Fox said, is that people who do not get vaccines may be less likely to seek out testing if they get infected. This could make it look like people with fewer vaccines were at lower risk of infection when they really weren’t. 

People were considered to have been infected if they had a positive PCR test result, Shrestha said. He added that there were certainly missed infections, although the researchers found a similar rate of PCR testing regardless of the number of prior doses. 

The study did not include data on at-home tests. The researchers said workers were required to test positive with PCR tests to take time off work for COVID-19, which may have lessened the number of people who only relied on at-home tests.

The researchers also mentioned that time since employees were last infected may have confounded the results, since people who had been more recently infected were at lower risk of COVID-19.

Vaccination lowers infection risk, but only for a time — so it’s possible people with fewer vaccinations were more likely to have been infected more recently, thereby protecting them during the study period.

Fox said that people who got fewer vaccines could be younger and healthier, although the relative youth of the employees may have mitigated this factor. Younger or healthier people could be less prone to getting sick and less likely to get tested if they were sick. The researchers did not adjust anywhere in the paper for whether the participants had various illnesses other than COVID-19, Fox said. 

And it is not possible to adjust for exposure to the virus, he added. The researchers wrote that people who got fewer than three vaccine doses could have been “more likely to exhibit risk-taking behavior,” but Fox said that it’s possible people who get vaccinated are more exposed to the virus than those who are not.

COVID-19 Vaccines Reduce Infection Risk

The aim of the COVID-19 vaccine program is to protect against severe disease, according to the CDC, and the vaccines are accomplishing this. But as we’ve said, the vaccines have also provided some protection against getting sick at all.

The initial clinical trials of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, of course, showed a reduction in symptomatic COVID-19 of more than 90%, and boosters also reduced symptomatic COVID-19. 

“When clinical trials have been run on boosters, a marked increase in efficacy has been observed,” Bhattacharya said. Protection against COVID-19 has fallen with the arrival of the omicron variants, he said, “but it is really hard to think of a plausible immunological mechanism that would make the booster shots worse than not having them.”

The Cleveland Clinic study found that getting the bivalent booster was associated with a 29% reduction in risk of getting BA.4 and BA.5 — the omicron subvariants the booster targeted. It had an effectiveness of 20% for the next set of variants, the BQ family of subvariants. The study did not find protection against testing positive for infections with the currently dominant XBB family.

Assessments of vaccine effectiveness against XBB viruses have been mixed. A CDC study, for instance, showed similar effectiveness of the bivalent vaccine against BA.5 and XBB subvariants.

“I do think we would expect reduced effectiveness with different strains, but I doubt that it is this low,” Fox said of the Cleveland Clinic study findings. 

Regardless, the study certainly did not show that getting vaccinated increased infection risk.

No Confirmed Negative Immunological Impacts from Boosters

A more complicated question is whether vaccine doses directed at one version of the virus could eventually lead to a less optimal immune response to other variants.

The theoretical concern, as we’ve explained in past articles, is that the immune response may become too focused on an element of an older version of the virus, reducing future flexibility to respond to new variants. This could have implications for decisions on how often to recommend boosters and what versions of the virus to boost against.

But analyses of immune responses to the original boosters didn’t show signs of this narrowing. There is also evidence the bivalent booster broadens immunity, leading to activity directed at newer forms of the virus, according to a recent review paper published in Immunity by Marios Koutsakos from the University of Melbourne and Ali Ellebedy from Washington University in St. Louis. 

In addition, “clinical and epidemiological studies support the notion that any prior exposures to SARS-CoV-2 by infection and/or vaccination have a positive impact in mitigating disease severity of subsequent infections,” they wrote. 

A May 18 statement from a World Health Organization advisory group on vaccine composition said there is evidence from laboratory work that prior exposures to COVID-19 or vaccines may reduce certain immune cells’ response to new parts of a variant. “However, based on observational epidemiological studies to date, the clinical impact remains unclear,” the statement says.

Some studies found that the bivalent and original boosters led to similar levels of neutralizing antibodies against omicron subvariants, leading researchers to suggest that immune memory from prior exposures to the original vaccines helps explain the lack of a superior response to the updated boosters.

Bhattacharya said there is evidence that the immune system prefers “to rapidly respond first to parts of the virus that have not mutated or changed relative to the vaccine.”

But this isn’t harmful. “Study after study has shown that this type of response markedly enhances protective antibodies,” he said. “To the extent that these antibodies clear the virus out quickly, there can be a suppression of new immune responses to the mutated parts of the virus, but this is only because the virus is gone. The immune system is thus responding in proportion to need.”

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

“Frequently Asked Questions about COVID-19 Vaccination.” CDC website. Updated 15 May 2023.

Link-Gelles, Ruth et al. “Early Estimates of Bivalent mRNA Booster Dose Vaccine Effectiveness in Preventing Symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infection Attributable to Omicron BA.5– and XBB/XBB.1.5–Related Sublineages Among Immunocompetent Adults — Increasing Community Access to Testing Program, United States, December 2022–January 2023.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 3 Feb 2023.

Wu, Nana et al. “Long-Term Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccines against Infections, Hospitalisations, and Mortality in Adults: Findings from a Rapid Living Systematic Evidence Synthesis and Meta-Analysis up to December, 2022.” The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. 10 Feb 2023.

Shrestha, Nabin K. et al. “Effectiveness of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Bivalent Vaccine.” Open Forum Infectious Diseases. 19 Apr 2023.

McDonald, Jessica. “Q&A on Omicron-Updated COVID-19 Boosters.” FactCheck.org. 23 Sept. 2022.

“Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update: FDA Authorizes Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech Bivalent COVID-19 Vaccines for Use as a Booster Dose.” FDA news release. 31 Aug 2022.

Robertson, Lori. “Studies Show Boosted Immunity Against Omicron with Booster Doses.” FactCheck.org. 28 Jan 2022.

McDonald, Jessica. “COVID-19 Booster Enhances Protection, Contrary to ‘Immune Fatigue’ Claims.” FactCheck.org. 4 Feb 2022.

The Gateway Pundit (@gatewaypundit). “groundbreaking study conducted by the renowned Cleveland Clinic, ranked as the second-best hospital in the world, has found that a higher number of COVID-19 vaccine doses received increases the risk of infection with COVID-19 …” Instagram. 11 Jun 2023.

Jimmy Dore (@jimmy_dore). “FYI: It’s not a vaccine. It’s a failed experiment. We were the guinea pigs.” Twitter. 30 May 2023.

Shrestha, Nabin K. et al. “Effectiveness of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines among Employees in an American Healthcare System.” medRxiv. 5 Jun 2021.

Aronson, JK et al. “Confounding.” Catalogue of Biases. 2018.

McDonald, Jessica. “Vaccinated People Not More Susceptible to COVID-19 Than Unvaccinated.” FactCheck.org. Updated 23 Jan 2023.

Hoft, Jim. “Cleveland Clinic Peer-Reviewed Study Found That the More Vaccines You’ve Had, the Higher Your COVID-19 Infection Risk.” The Gateway Pundit. 3 Jun 2023.

⌘ ⌘ MrsPitbull ⌘ ⌘ (@MrsPitbull). “🚨🚨🚨 BREAKING: Cleveland clinic study which found that “The higher the number of vaccines previously received, the higher the risk of contracting COVID-19” has been peer review published. …” Twitter. 29 May 2023.

“Overview of COVID-19 Vaccines.” CDC website. Updated 23 May 2023.

McDonald, Jessica. “A Guide to Pfizer/BioNTech’s COVID-19 Vaccine.” FactCheck.org. Updated 21 Apr 2023.

McDonald, Jessica. “A Guide to Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccine.” FactCheck.org. Updated 21 Apr 2023.

“COVID Data Tracker – Variant Proportions.” CDC website. Updated 9 Jun 2023. 

“Statement on the Antigen Composition of COVID-19 Vaccines.” World Health Organization website. 18 May 2023. 

McDonald, Jessica. “Q&A on Second COVID-19 Boosters for Older People.” FactCheck.org. Updated 23 May 2022.

Koutsakos, Marios and Ellebedy, Ali H. “Immunological Imprinting: Understanding COVID-19.” Immunity. 19 Apr 2023.

Wang, Qian et al. “Antibody Response to Omicron BA.4–BA.5 Bivalent Booster.” New England Journal of Medicine. 9 Feb 2023.

Collier, Ai-ris Y. et al. “Immunogenicity of BA.5 Bivalent mRNA Vaccine Boosters.” New England Journal of Medicine. 9 Feb 2023.

Offit, Paul A. “Bivalent Covid-19 Vaccines — A Cautionary Tale.” New England Journal of Medicine. 9 Feb 2023.

The post Cleveland Clinic Study Did Not Show Vaccines Increase COVID-19 Risk appeared first on FactCheck.org.

The federal public health emergency for COVID-19 ended on May 11, bringing changes to health care and public benefits. In this video, FactCheck.org teamed up with Factchequeado to answer some questions about how this might affect you.

The end of the public health emergency is not the end of all pandemic-related benefits, so many people won’t feel a difference immediately, as Anne Sosin, a policy fellow studying rural health equity at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth, told us.

Overall, the “widest ranging impact” directly resulting from the end of the public health emergency, according to KFF, is the rise in the cost of COVID-19 tests. People on Medicaid can still get free at-home tests through September 2024, but the tests are no longer covered by insurers for most other people.

The cost of vaccines and treatments won’t change immediately. However, the government supply of vaccines is only expected to last through the summer or early fall.

Many of the telehealth benefits for people on Medicaid and Medicare were made permanent or extended until the end of 2024.

For more details, see our story “Q&A on the End of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency,” which, like the video, is available in English and Spanish.

This video is the first in a series of videos that will be jointly produced by FactCheck.org and Factchequeado, a media outlet that counters Spanish-language misinformation in the U.S. Latino community, to provide accurate information on health issues. 

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.

The post Video: Q&A on the End of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency appeared first on FactCheck.org.

The latest ad from the anti-Trump Lincoln Project promotes the same mistaken argument that Donald Trump himself has made — that the former president has been charged with spying or espionage. Trump was charged under a part of the Espionage Act concerning the willful retention of national defense information. That’s different from spying.

The ad likens Trump to some of the country’s worst traitors, all charged under different portions of the Espionage Act related to passing classified information to U.S. adversaries, either the former Soviet Union or Cuba. That’s not what Trump is accused of in the June 8 federal indictment.

The Lincoln Project, a group of mostly former and current Republicans who regularly produce biting ads targeting Trump, often runs those ads where Trump lives, specifically to get under the former president’s skin. The 60-second “Espionage” ad, for example, was aired this week on Fox News in the Palm Beach area, which includes Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s home and club; in Bedminster, New Jersey, where Trump spends his summers; and in Washington, D.C.

But in this case, the group is making the same argument Trump himself has been making — implying that he has been charged as a spy — though for very different reasons. Trump has wrongly said he is being charged as a spy to make the argument that the Department of Justice is overreaching. The Lincoln Project, on the other hand, simply makes the argument that Trump is accused of “one of the worst crimes imaginable” and therefore belongs in prison.

The ad’s narrator says, “Indicted again, this time for violating the Espionage Act. One of the worst crimes imaginable, but he joins a select list of Americans also indicted for this crime. Robert Hanssen, Aldrich Ames, Ana Montes, John Walker, Ronald William Pelton, all indicted for violating the Espionage Act with the prison terms that traitors and spies against America deserve. … There’s no excuse for espionage.”

These are the people listed in the ad, all spies who provided classified information to U.S. adversaries:

• Robert Hanssen. A former FBI agent, Hanssen was arrested in 2001 “and charged with committing espionage on behalf of Russia and the former Soviet Union … in exchange for more than $1.4 million in cash, bank funds, and diamonds,” according to the FBI, which called him “the most damaging spy in Bureau history.” He pleaded guilty to espionage, attempted espionage and conspiracy to commit espionage. Hanssen died in prison earlier this month.
• Aldrich Ames. Ames was a 31-year employee of the CIA who was accused by the FBI in 1994 of spying for the Russians. The FBI said Ames “passed classified information about CIA and FBI human sources, as well as technical operations targeting the Soviet Union” to Russian KGB agents in exchange for payments of nearly $2 million. The FBI said some of Aldrich’s disclosures compromised “the identities of CIA and FBI human sources, some of whom were executed by Soviet authorities.” He pleaded guilty to espionage and is serving a life sentence in prison.
• Ana Montes. Montes was a senior analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency who acted as a spy for Cuba, sharing classified information with the U.S. adversary, according to the FBI. She was charged in 2001 with conspiracy to deliver U.S. national defense information to Cuba. The FBI says Montes’ motivation for spying for Cuba was not greed — she was not paid for providing Cuba classified information — but rather “[p]ure ideology—she disagreed with U.S. foreign policy.” Montes was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and was released earlier this year. She lives in Puerto Rico.
• John Anthony Walker Jr. Walker is a former U.S. Navy warrant officer who was charged in 1985 with “selling U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union,” the FBI said. Walker provided the Soviets with classified information, including naval cryptographic technology, and, the FBI said, recruited a friend and family members to spy for the Soviet Union as well. He pleaded guilty to espionage. He was sentenced to life and died in federal prison in 2014.
• Ronald William Pelton. A former communications specialist for the National Security Agency, Pelton was convicted in 1986 of selling classified information to the Soviets for five years, the FBI said, “including details on U.S. collection programs targeting the Soviets.” During his trial, Bob Woodward and Patrick E. Tyler wrote for the Washington Post that “Pelton’s betrayal represented one of the gravest American intelligence losses to the Soviet Union.” He was sentenced to life in prison but was released after serving nearly three decades behind bars. He died in September.

As we have written, Trump was charged with 31 alleged violations of a section of the Espionage Act. But he is not accused of being a spy.

Rather, Trump is charged with violating 18 U.S.C. 793 (e), a section of the act concerning the willful retention of national defense information. That part of the law makes it a crime to have “unauthorized possession” of documents “relating to the national defense.” It is not only unlawful if someone “willfully communicates, delivers, transmits” such documents to “any person not entitled to receive it” — which the indictment alleges Trump did twice, once to an author and once to a staffer at his political action committee — but the law also says it is illegal if a person “willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it.”

Like the ad does, Trump and some of his defenders have also misleadingly claimed that Trump was charged with espionage.

“Espionage charges are absolutely ridiculous,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said on ABC’s “This Week” on June 11. “Whether you like Trump or not, he did not commit espionage. He did not disseminate, leak or provide information to a foreign power or to a news organization to damage this country. He is not a spy. He’s overcharged.”

In his speech in New Jersey following his June 13 arraignment in Miami, Trump said, “The Espionage Act has been used to go after traitors and spies. It has nothing to do with a former president legally keeping his own documents.”

Trump also raised the “spy” straw man in a speech in Georgia on June 12. Trump noted that when he left office, there were photos taken of boxes of documents stacked on the sidewalk outside the White House prior to their transport to Florida.

“If that’s a spy operation or if that’s something bad, we did a very poor job, I will tell you,” Trump said.

But, again, those are a mischaracterization of the charges.

“Trump is not accused of committing espionage, or being a spy,” David Alan Sklansky, a professor who teaches criminal law at Stanford University, told us via email. “He is accused of illegally holding onto documents with sensitive information about the national defense, lying to federal investigators, obstructing justice.”

The Espionage Act “contains a bunch of different criminal prohibitions related to national defense and national security; one of them applies to anyone who, without authorization, holds onto documents with sensitive national defense information,” Sklansky added. “That’s one of the crimes that Trump is accused of having committed. But he is not charged with ‘espionage’ or with being a ‘spy.’ Those words do not even appear in the indictment.”

Now, Trump’s detractors are misleadingly using the charges against Trump to tie him to spies convicted of passing classified information to U.S. adversaries. 

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SciCheck Digest

Human coronaviruses first identified in the 1960s cause common colds. But a viral video misrepresents early research on common coronaviruses and cites unrelated patents to falsely suggest U.S. scientists created the viruses that cause SARS and COVID-19. The video also is not footage of official testimony before the European Parliament.

What do we know about the origins of SARS-CoV-2?

Full Story

Scientists have been studying coronaviruses, a family of viruses that infect animals and humans, for decades — the first was identified in chickens in the 1930s. In 1968, after the first human coronavirus was identified in 1965, virologists grouped them and named them coronaviruses for their crown-like surface, which also resembles the outermost layer of the sun called the corona (corona is the Latin word for crown). 

Seven coronaviruses are known to infect humans — four of them, known as common human coronaviruses (229E, NL63, OC43 and HKU1), generally cause mild to moderate symptoms of a common cold. But coronaviruses got more attention in 2003, after the emergence of SARS-CoV-1, the first coronavirus known to cause a severe respiratory illness in humans, followed by MERS-CoV in 2012, and SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, in 2019.

Both SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV originated in animals and jumped to humans. Although there is still no proof of how SARS-CoV-2 started, many scientists think the available evidence also points to a zoonotic spillover. If SARS-CoV-2 did escape from a lab in Wuhan, there is a general consensus that it was an accident. A U.S. Intelligence report released in 2021 showed that all agencies agreed that “the virus was not developed as a biological weapon” and “most” said the virus “probably was not genetically engineered,” as we reported.

Yet, in a widely shared video misleadingly presented as testimony to the European Parliament, David Martin, a financial analyst, cited unrelated patents and distorted early research on coronaviruses to falsely suggest that scientists in the U.S. created the viruses that cause SARS and COVID-19 as part of a plot to drive vaccine profits.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this was premeditated domestic terrorism,” he said of the COVID-19 pandemic (mark 19:22). “This is an act of biological and chemical warfare perpetrated on the human race. … [T]his was a financial heist and a financial fraud,” he added — a quote that was later shared in a Twitter post that has been retweeted more than 75,000 times.

Except Martin’s entire argument is bunk. Dr. Susan R. Weiss, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, told us in a phone interview that his statements are full of inaccuracies and completely distort past coronavirus research.

“There is no basis for any of this,” she said. “It makes no scientific sense.”

Martin has pushed several conspiracy theories about the pandemic. In 2020, he was a central figure in the second “Plandemic” video, which also falsely claimed that the pandemic was planned, as we’ve written.

Not European Parliament Testimony

Part of the appeal of Martin’s video — and lending false legitimacy to his claims — is that at first glance, it appears he is speaking in front of the European Parliament and giving official testimony.

“[C]ant believe my ears, what is being said at the europian union,” a Facebook user said, sharing the video, which shows Martin next to a European Parliament flag in what might look to someone like the European Parliament Hemicycle.

“Must watch: This is the opening presentation by Dr David Martin on the origins of Covid in 1965 & Covid Vaccines in 1990!” a Twitter user wrote. “He speaks in front of the European Parliament International Covid Summit III in Brussels on May 3, 2023. Hear and be shocked..!” 

In reality, only five of the 705 members of the European Parliament participated in the event, which took place in a room of the parliament’s building in Brussels, as part of a three-day meeting organized by COVID-19 skeptics and anti-vaccination activists. The five Parliament members have participated in actions opposing COVID-19 vaccines.

Natalie Kontoulis, a press officer for the European Parliament, told us in an email that the meeting “was not an official European Parliament event.” She added, “Members of the Parliament can exercise their mandate freely and bear responsibility for both their activities and their content.”

According to the event’s website, the speaker line-up included some prominent COVID-19 misinformation spreaders, including Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Pierre Kory, and Dr. Ryan Cole. The event content was turned into a book called “ICS 3 – The Whole Truth” and commercialized — a paperback copy sells for $29.99.

SARS-CoV-2 is New, Not Engineered for 56 Years  

During the almost 22-minute video, Martin spins a scientifically impossible story that suggests that SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses are the result of experimentation with common cold coronaviruses that were discovered in the 1960s.

“This is actually something that’s been long in the making,” he said of the COVID-19 pandemic (mark 5:31). “In 1967, the year I was born, we did the first human trials on inoculating people with modified coronavirus. Isn’t that amazing? 56 years ago — the overnight success of a pathogen that’s been 56 years in engineering.”

But Martin, who misleads throughout by implying all coronaviruses might be the same, is misrepresenting a study that involved infecting people with a coronavirus that causes a cold. The virus had not been modified. More important, the notion that a common coronavirus could have been manipulated or engineered to create SARS-CoV-2 is incorrect.

“They’re too different,” Weiss said. “We don’t have the ability to turn one into the other.”

About a minute later, he said, “Ironically, the common cold was turned into a chimera in the 1970s. And in 1975, 1976, and 1977 we started figuring out how to modify coronavirus by putting it into different animals, pigs and dogs.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Weiss told us. 

First, as we said, there are multiple kinds of coronaviruses. Some infect animals and others infect humans — and a few can cross from one species to another one, Weiss told us. “It turns out, the human virus … at least the cold virus, as far as I know, only replicates in humans.” The viruses couldn’t be genetically modified at that time, either, she explained. “We couldn’t engineer viruses at that time,” she said of the 1970s, since the technology to do it, such as cloning, didn’t yet exist. 

Martin continues to mislead by saying the inoculation of those supposedly modified common coronaviruses created a huge problem in the pig and dog industry, which led Pfizer to patent its “first spike protein vaccine” in 1990. “Isn’t that fascinating? Isn’t it fascinating that we were, we were told that, ‘Well, the spike protein is a new thing,’” he said (mark 7:44).

Except, that patent was for a canine coronavirus vaccine, which targets an entirely different virus from SARS-CoV-2. In 2020, we debunked related claims that also confused canine coronavirus with the virus that caused the pandemic.

Moreover, scientists have never said that coronavirus spike proteins are “new.” The specific SARS-CoV-2 spike was new, and the genetic sequence was needed to design the vaccines. But one reason why the COVID-19 vaccines could be made so rapidly is because scientists already knew the virus’s spike proteins would be good vaccine targets. The existence of that previous knowledge is not evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was created as a bioweapon or as part of a ploy to sell vaccines.

Martin also falsely claims that SARS-CoV-1 was created in an American lab.

“Are you suggesting that SARS … might have come from a laboratory in the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill? No, I’m not suggesting it. I’m telling you that’s the facts — we engineered SARS,” he said. “SARS is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. The naturally occurring phenomenon is called the common cold … SARS is the research developed by humans weaponizing a life system model to actually attack human beings.”

There is no evidence SARS-CoV-1 was engineered or came from any lab. The virus naturally appeared in 2002 in China, when it likely jumped from civets to humans, and its origins are linked to bats.

Martin pointed to a 2002 patent as supposed proof. But the patent, which is for a method for creating viral vectors, focuses on a pig coronavirus (viral vectors are used to deliver genetic information to cells). As before, the patent is not evidence that the SARS virus was engineered.

Martin also distorted the meaning of a line of the patent that says the method could help produce “an infectious, replication defective, coronavirus particle.”

“Listen to those words: infectious replication defective,” Martin said suggestively (mark 10:18). “What does that phrase actually mean for those of you not familiar with language? Let me unpack it for you. Infectious replication defective means a weapon. It means something meant to target an individual but not have collateral damage to other individuals.” 

But he’s wrong again. Replication-defective simply means that a viral particle would be incapable of replicating itself.

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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“Virology: Coronaviruses.” Nature. Vol. 220. 16 Nov 1968. 

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“Common Human Coronaviruses.” CDC. Updated 13 Feb 2020.

“Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).” CDC. 6 Dec 2017.

“Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).” CDC. Updated 2 Aug 2019

Spencer, Saranac H., et al. “New ‘Plandemic’ Video Peddles Misinformation, Conspiracies.” FactCheck.org. Updated 29 Jun 2021. 

Weiss, Susan R. Vice Chair, Department of Microbiology, University of Pennsylvania. Phone interview with FactCheck.org. 5 Jun 2023. 

Malone, Robert. “Videos: The International Covid Summit III in the European Parliament, Brussels.” Substack. 15 May 2023. 

Alexander, Lorraine K., et al. “An Experimental Model for Dilated Cardiomyopathy after Rabbit Coronavirus Infection.” The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Vol. 166. 1 Nov 1992.

Kontoulis, Natalie. Press officer for the European Parliament. Email sent to FactCheck.org. 9 Jun 2023. 

Curtis, Kristopher, et al. “Methods for Producing Recombinant Coronavirus.” International Patent Number WO 02/086068 A2. 31 Oct 2002. Robertson, Lori. “Still No Determination on COVID-19 Origin.” FactCheck.org. 20 Mar 2023.

The post Video Distorts Early Coronavirus Research To Promote Baseless Bioweapon Conspiracy Theory appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Quick Take

Rockefeller Center is celebrating Pride Month with a display of rainbow flags to show it is “an inclusive and diverse space for all.” But an Instagram post uses an image of Pride flags at Rockefeller Center while falsely claiming it shows the “United Nations replaces all 193 country flags with LGBT flags.” The U.N. never changes its flag display, a spokesperson said.

Full Story

Many companies and institutions observe Pride Month each June to show support for the LGBTQ+ community. This year, the rainbow displays and expressions of inclusivity have met with backlash from some conservatives. 

Target, for example, removed merchandise from its “Pride Collection” following protests and threats from some customers, citing concern for employee safety. Even the popular Cracker Barrel restaurant chain faced a boycott for acknowledging Pride Month. 

Social media posts have fanned the flames by spreading misinformation about support for Pride Month. As we wrote, an artist’s animated video showing a rainbow appearing to encircle the Arc de Triomphe in Paris was making the rounds with the false claim that the rainbow was physically attached to the historic monument and “defaced” it. 

A June 8 Instagram post misrepresents a different Pride Month display. The text on the post says, “The United Nations replaces all 193 country flags with LGBT flags.” It received more than 115,000 likes. 

The post from Clarkson Lawson, who has 126,000 Instagram followers, uses a photo with that text as a backdrop of a video in which he expresses his view that celebrating Pride Month is akin to “special treatment” for the LGBTQ+ community. “Nobody in their right mind wants to be completely inundated with Pride flags for the month of June,” he says in the video.

But the U.N. did not take down the flags of its member nations for Pride Month.

“The only flags that fly in front of the U.N. are the 193 member states’ flags and [those of] the two observers, and the U.N. flag,” Shirin Yaseen, associate spokesperson for the U.N. secretary-general, told us in a phone interview. Those flags are always displayed and are never replaced for occasions such as Pride Month, Yaseen said. 

UNAIDS, the U.N. agency charged with ending the AIDS epidemic, did issue a statement affirming “solidarity” with LGBTQ+ communities. 

“Pride Month provides an opportunity to celebrate the resilience, diversity, and achievements” of those communities, while serving as “a reminder of the important collective commitment to human rights, equality, and the urgent need to decriminalize same-sex relationships,” the agency said.

In addition, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said in a June 1 tweet, “Let’s celebrate the richness & diversity of the LGBTIQ+ community and honour their immense contributions to the human rights movement.”

Rather than at the U.N. headquarters in New York City, the photo shown in the Instagram post was actually taken at the plaza of Rockefeller Center, possibly in 2019. 

On its website, Rockefeller Center explains the celebration of Pride Month has become a “staple” at its space in Manhattan, “playing a key role in ensuring there’s an inclusive and diverse space for all in the heart of Midtown.”

“Throughout the month of June, our campus will be awash in signs and symbols of Pride with rainbow pathways, hundreds of Pride flags surrounding The Rink, and vinyl decals decorating its spaces,” the center’s website says.

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

Cavale, Siddharth. “Target removing some LGBTQ merchandise following customer backlash.” Reuters. 24 May 2023.

Peiser, Jaclyn. “Target stores see more bomb threats over Pride merchandise.” Washington Post. 12 Jun 2023.

Brooks, Khristopher J. “Bud Light loses its footing as America’s best-selling beer.” CBS News Moneywatch. 9 Jun 2023.

Brooks, Khristopher J. “Cracker Barrel faces boycott call for celebrating Pride Month.” 9 Jun 2023.

Jones, Brea. “Posts Misrepresent Virtual Rainbow on Arc de Triomphe for Pride Month.” FactCheck.org. 12 Jun 2023.

Yaseen, Shirin. Associate spokesperson for Executive Office of the Secretary-General, United Nations. Phone interview with FactCheck.org. 13 Jun 2023.

United Nations. “UNAIDS celebrates Pride Month and calls for decriminalization of same-sex relationships.” Press release. 1 Jun 2023.

Rockefeller Center. “Pride at Rockefeller Center 2023.” Website.

Wikimedia Commons. Photo captioned, “Regenbogenflaggen an der Rockefeller Plaza, New York City, anlässlich des fünfzigjährigen Jubiläums der Stonewall Riots 2019.” 

The post Viral Video Makes False Claim About Pride Month Flag Display appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Quick Take 

A privately owned company called the White House Gift Shop is selling a coin commemorating the second indictment of former President Donald Trump. But, contrary to a misleading tweet from Sen. Bill Cassidy, the online sales company is not affiliated with the White House in Washington, D.C.

Full Story

Donald Trump is the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges. Twice.

He was first charged in a New York state court in April for crimes related to hush money payments he allegedly made to a porn actor. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

On June 13, he was charged in federal court in Florida for alleged crimes related to mishandling classified documents and obstructing federal officials who tried to retrieve the files after he left office. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

The day before Trump’s second arraignment, Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, posted a video to his Twitter account admonishing a company called the White House Gift Shop for selling a coin commemorating Trump’s second indictment.

The video was an installment in Cassidy’s recurring Twitter segment called “Outrage of the Week.”

In this installment, Cassidy said: “Outrage of the week — the White House Gift Shop is putting out a commemorative coin for Donald Trump’s indictment. Now, whatever you think about it, whatever party you are, you’ve got to admit it’s poor taste, that it’s capitalizing upon something without his permission, I’m sure. It’s the wrong thing to do. Have a sense of decency, White House Gift Shop.”

Cassidy’s tweet fails to say that the shop is not affiliated with the White House in Washington, D.C., or the federal government, leaving the false impression that the Biden White House is involved.

But the White House Gift Shop is a privately run, web-based retail sales company not affiliated with the White House. We’ve explained this before, when online posts in 2020 criticized the company’s sale of coins commemorating the COVID-19 pandemic and falsely suggested that the shop was affiliated with the White House.

The shop also sold a coin commemorating Trump’s first indictment which, like the coin at the center of the current controversy, sold for $100.

The website describes the coins as “Our Newest Narrative Great Moments in Presidential History in Narrative Coin Art.” It goes on to say, “Epilogue Coin #2 in the Series of the Administration of Presidential Donald J. Trump is a Continuation of the White House Gift Shop’s Historic Moments Original & Unique Global Coin Collection that Chronicles Pivotal Moments in American Presidential & Political History.”

Although Cassidy didn’t explicitly claim that the shop was connected to the executive branch, some social media users understood it that way. “Truly, a politicized White House,” one comment read.

Some other accounts on various platforms have also picked up the claim and repeated it without explaining that the gift shop is not affiliated with the White House. One post on Truth Social, for example, says that Republicans should “insist that the White House Gift shop be closed down immediately under the Biden Cabal.”

We reached out to Cassidy’s Senate office and were referred to his campaign for comment because the video appeared on his campaign Twitter account. We asked his campaign by email if the senator knew that the website isn’t affiliated with the White House and, if so, why he chose to highlight that company’s merchandise. We didn’t get a response.

It’s worth noting that Cassidy, who is not up for reelection until 2026, was one of seven Republicans who voted to find Trump guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors following the former president’s second impeachment after the deadly riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Cassidy has also said he doesn’t think Trump could win the general election in 2024.

So, Cassidy hasn’t always supported the former president, but his suggestion that the executive branch is unfairly targeting Trump with commemorative coins is misleading.

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

Waxman, Olivia. “Donald Trump Is the First President Ever Criminally Charged. Others Have Come Close Though.” Time. Updated 30 Mar 2023.

Farley, Robert and D’Angelo Gore. “What’s in Trump’s Indictment?” FactCheck.org. 4 Apr 2023.

Farley, Robert, D’Angelo Gore and Eugene Kiely. “Q&A on Trump’s Federal Indictment.” FactCheck.org. 9 Jun 2023.

Cassidy, Bill (@BillCassidy). “The White House Gift Shop should not be selling a commemorative coin marking Donald Trump’s indictment. This is totally outrageous.” Twitter. 12 Jun 2023.

The White House Gift Shop, Inc. “APPLICATION FOR CERTIFICATE OF AUTHORITY TO TRANSACT BUSINESS IN MICHIGAN.” Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs. 7 Nov 2022.

Fichera, Angelo. “The White House Isn’t Selling Coronavirus Coins.” FactCheck.org. Updated 5 Oct 2020.

Farley, Robert. “How Many Died as a Result of Capitol Riot?” FactCheck.org. Updated 21 Mar 2022.

Kiely, Eugene, et al. “Trump’s Falsehood-Filled ‘Save America’ Rally.” FactCheck.org. 6 Jan 2021.

The post Online Posts Misrepresent Coin Commemorating Trump’s Second Indictment appeared first on FactCheck.org.

In the days leading up to his June 13 arraignment and in a speech several hours afterward, former President Donald Trump distorted what the federal indictment against him said and made faulty comparisons to other politicians’ actions.

• Trump claimed the indictment against him contains “fake and fabricated charges.” In fact, Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, called it “very detailed” and “very, very damning.”

• Trump and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham have misleadingly objected to Trump being charged under the Espionage Act, saying he wasn’t a “spy.” He was charged under a section of the act concerning willful retention of national defense documents.

• Trump wrongly claimed the Presidential Records Act was “really the ruling act,” not the Espionage Act.

• The former president mischaracterized the lengthy effort by the National Archives and Records Administration and the Department of Justice to retrieve presidential records and classified materials from him — claiming that he was “negotiating” with NARA and “the next thing I knew, Mar-a-Lago was raided by gun-toting FBI agents.”

• Trump compared his situation to what he called the Bill Clinton “socks case.” But Clinton’s case was not about classified documents. It involved audiotapes of Clinton’s conversations with a historian documenting his presidency; the National Archives said the tapes were Clinton’s personal records, and a federal judge dismissed the case.

• He claimed a photo in the indictment showed only “newspapers, personal pictures” spilling out of a box onto the floor. But some information is redacted in the photo, and the indictment says the spilled records included a classified document available only to a five-country intelligence alliance.

• Trump claimed Hillary Clinton deleted “33,000 emails in defiance of a congressional subpoena.” He’s referring to personal emails, not government records, and there is no evidence she knew when they were deleted.

• He falsely suggested that Biden is “obstructing” a federal review of more than a thousand boxes of Biden’s records. The FBI searched the Senate records that Biden had donated to the University of Delaware, and Biden’s attorneys gave federal officials the classified documents that were found at Biden’s home and former office.

• Trump promoted a misleading claim that Biden “had to sign off” on the FBI’s criminal investigation of Trump. The investigation was already underway when the White House, following federal law, requested that the FBI be allowed to review 15 boxes containing classified documents that Trump gave to the National Archives in January 2022.

Trump made these claims in remarks from Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, after his arraignment and in speeches and social media posts over several days beforehand, including a June 10 speech in Columbus, Georgia. On June 13 in a Miami courthouse, Trump was booked on 37 felony counts, including willfully retaining national defense information, conspiring to obstruct justice, withholding and concealing documents, and making false statements.

Not a ‘Baseless’ Indictment

In his post-arraignment speech in New Jersey, Trump claimed the indictment against him contains “fake and fabricated charges.” In Georgia, he called the charging document “ridiculous and baseless.” He added, “Many people have said that. Democrats have even said it.”

We are not aware of any Democrats who have said that. In fact, there are some allies — including those who worked in his administration — who have said the indictment is “very detailed … and it’s very, very damning,” as Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, put it.

“This idea of presenting Trump as a victim here — a victim of witch hunt is ridiculous,” Barr said on “Fox News Sunday” on June 11. “Yes, he’s been a victim in the past. Yes, his adversaries have obsessively pursued him with phony claims. And I’ve — and I’ve been by his side defending against them when he is a victim. But this is much different. He’s not a victim here. He was totally wrong that he had the right to have those documents.”

Law professor Jonathan Turley, a Fox News contributor who was a Republican witness during Trump’s first impeachment in 2019, described the indictment as “devastating” and “breathtaking.”

“Every indictment ever used against any of my clients has tended to diminish with time, but there are still some very damaging things in this indictment, not just the photographs, but an audio tape that the president is going to have to deal with,” Turley said June 9 on Fox News, referring to an audiotape of Trump meeting with four individuals at his New Jersey golf club and sharing with them what the former president described as a “highly confidential” and “secret” plan to attack a foreign country, reportedly Iran.

Asked what’s the most damning part of the indictment, former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb told CNN, “I think it’s very hard to triage what’s the most damning part because they do appear to have a document, a tape, a picture, a witness for virtually every phrase and allegation in here.” Having said that, he said one particularly damning part is Trump aide Walt Nauta moving boxes of documents at Trump’s direction to allegedly conceal classified documents not only from the FBI but from Trump’s attorney, Evan Corcoran.

No ‘Spy’ Charges

Trump and some of his defenders have scoffed at him being charged under the Espionage Act, saying there is no evidence he ever acted as a spy or shared sensitive information with a foreign adversary. But experts say that’s simply a mischaracterization or misunderstanding of the charges.

“Espionage charges are absolutely ridiculous,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said on ABC’s “This Week” on June 11. “Whether you like Trump or not, he did not commit espionage. He did not disseminate, leak or provide information to a foreign power or to a news organization to damage this country. He is not a spy. He’s overcharged.”

In his speech in Bedminster, New Jersey, following his arraignment in Miami, Trump said, “The Espionage Act has been used to go after traitors and spies and has nothing to do with a former president legally keeping his own documents.”

Trump also raised the “spy” straw man in his speech in Georgia. Trump noted that when he left office, there were photos taken of boxes of documents stacked on the sidewalk outside the White House prior to their transport to Florida.

“If that’s a spy operation or if that’s something bad, we did a very poor job, I will tell you,” Trump said.

“No one is suggesting that it was a crime for Trump to have boxes moved from the White House to Florida,” David Alan Sklansky, a professor who teaches criminal law at Stanford University, told us via email. “The problem was what was in some of those boxes–namely, highly sensitive documents relating to the national defense–and how Trump reacted when the government told him to return those documents. That’s what was criminal, not having boxes shipped to Florida.”

The indictment alleged that Trump was “personally involved” in having boxes, “containing hundreds of classified documents,” shipped to Mar-a-Lago at the end of his term, and then failed to return those documents to the federal government. The indictment does not accuse Trump of acting as a spy.

Rather, Trump was charged with 31 alleged violations of 18 U.S.C. 793 (e), a section of the Espionage Act concerning the willful retention of national defense information. That part of the law makes it a crime to have “unauthorized possession” of documents “relating to the national defense.” It is not only unlawful if someone “willfully communicates, delivers, transmits” such documents to “any person not entitled to receive it” — which the indictment alleges Trump did twice, once to an author and once to a staffer at his political action committee — but the law also says it is illegal if a person “willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it.”

“Trump is not accused of committing espionage, or being a spy,” Sklansky said. “He is accused of illegally holding onto documents with sensitive information about the national defense, lying to federal investigators, obstructing justice.” The Espionage Act “contains a bunch of different criminal prohibitions related to national defense and national security; one of them applies to anyone who, without authorization, holds onto documents with sensitive national defense information. That’s one of the crimes that Trump is accused of having committed. But he is not charged with ‘espionage’ or with being a ‘spy.’ Those words do not even appear in the indictment.”

Presidential Records Act Not ‘Ruling’ Over Espionage Act

In his speech in Georgia, Trump argued that prosecutors improperly ignored the “ruling” Presidential Records Act to charge him under the Espionage Act.

“And as president, all of my documents fell under what is known as the Presidential Records Act, which is not at all a criminal act, everything,” Trump said. “It’s all judged by the Presidential Records Act. In this whole fake indictment, they don’t even once mention the Presidential Records Act, which is really the ruling act, which this case falls under 100% because they want to use something called the Espionage Act. Doesn’t that sound terrible? Oh, espionage. We got a box. I got a box.”

Trump echoed that argument in his post-arraignment remarks in Bedminster, saying, “As president, the law that applies to this case is not the Espionage Act, but very simply the Presidential Records Act, which is not even mentioned in this ridiculous 44-page indictment. Under the Presidential Records Act, which is civil, not criminal, I had every right to have these documents. The crucial legal precedent is laid out in the most important case ever of this subject known as the Clinton socks case.”

We’ll get to the “Clinton socks case” later, but Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told us, “The former president is simply confused on the law when he says that the Presidential Records Act ‘rules’ over the Espionage Act or other provisions of the criminal code set out in the Indictment. The criminal acts charged in the Indictment stand independently of the former President’s separate failure to follow the requirements of the Presidential Records Act.”

“Under the Presidential Records Act, no boxes of presidential records should ever have been transferred to Mar-A-Lago,” said Baron, who is currently a professor at the University of Maryland. “President Trump has, however, been charged under the Espionage Act, in part because his unauthorized removal of records in those boxes related to the national defense, coupled with his willful retention of those documents at Mar-A-Lago, constitutes a crime.”

But Trump is also wrong to suggest the Presidential Records Act somehow shields him from prosecution, Sklansky told us.

“Neither the Presidential Records Act nor any other federal statute allows a former president to continue to hold onto documents with sensitive information relating to the national defense,” Sklansky said. “If Trump and his lawyers think differently, they can and should argue the point in court. But they’ll lose.”

The PRA and the National Archives

As Trump has done before, he wrongly claimed he was “negotiating” with the National Archives and Records Administration “just as every other president has done” and “the next thing I knew, Mar-a-Lago was raided by gun-toting FBI agents.”

That’s a distortion of the more-than-yearlong effort by the federal government to retrieve classified material and presidential records Trump had at his Mar-a-Lago home.

The former president made those comments in Georgia on June 10 and made similar remarks from his New Jersey golf club. At other times, he has said the Presidential Records Act allowed him to negotiate with NARA for the return of presidential materials. He invoked the PRA in a June 9 Truth Social post, claiming: “Under the Presidential Records Act, I’m allowed to do all this.”

He is not. While a president can keep personal materials, he or she cannot keep presidential documents — per the Presidential Records Act.

The PRA says that after a president’s term, the archivist “shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.” The materials a president can keep are “personal records,” or those “of a purely private or nonpublic character which do not relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President,” the act says.

Baron, the former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told us for a previous article on this topic that “presidential records are owned by the American people, not the president himself. … When President Trump’s term in office ended on January 20, 2021, all of his presidential records were required to be transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration.” 

As we’ve explained, NARA first asked Trump for missing presidential records on May 6, 2021, and continued asking for months, before getting 15 boxes of records on Jan. 18, 2022, according to the Department of Justice’s affidavit. When NARA then discovered classified documents among those records, it notified the DOJ.

On May 11, 2022, Trump’s office received a grand jury subpoena seeking additional classified documents. In response, Trump’s lawyers the following month handed over an envelope with 38 classified documents.

But that still wasn’t all of the classified documents Trump had in his possession. And the indictment describes how Trump had directed Nauta “to move boxes of documents to conceal them from Trump’s attorney, the FBI, and the grand jury.”

In August, the FBI obtained a court-approved search warrant  — contrary to Trump’s claim in New Jersey that the FBI search was “a flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution which protects the right against unreasonable search and seizure.” The FBI retrieved “over one hundred unique documents with classification markings,” according to a court filing.

‘Clinton Socks Case’

Trump has suggested that his situation is similar to what he has referred to as the “Clinton socks case,” which was not about classified documents.

“They also don’t mention the defining lawsuit that was brought against Bill Clinton and it was lost by the government, the famous ‘socks case’ that says he can keep his documents,” Trump said in his Georgia remarks.

He was wrongly describing a court case about taped conversations between Clinton and historian Taylor Branch that were recorded over several years. Clinton kept the audiotapes, an oral history of his presidency, in a sock drawer, and the interviews were the basis of Branch’s 2009 book, “The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President.”

In 2010, Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group — not the government — filed a lawsuit to get the National Archives to take custody of the tapes, which Judicial Watch argued were official presidential records that belonged to the government. However, NARA countered that the tapes were Clinton’s “personal records” under the Presidential Records Act, and a federal judge granted NARA’s motion to dismiss the suit in 2012.

“NARA does not have the authority to designate materials as ‘Presidential records,’ NARA does not have the tapes in question, and NARA lacks any right, duty, or means to seize control of them,” District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in the ruling. She wrote, “Since plaintiff is completely unable to identify anything the Court could order the agency to do that the agency has any power, much less, a mandatory duty, to do, the case must be dismissed.”

Photo of Spilled Documents

The indictment included a photo of a box of documents at Mar-a-Lago that had been spilled onto the floor — one of two photos taken by Trump employee Nauta in December 2021, the indictment says, when Nauta found the spilled contents, including a classified intelligence document, on the storage room floor at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump’s “unlawful retention of this document” is count 8 of the indictment.

The document was marked “’SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY,’ which denoted that the information in the document was releasable only to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance consisting of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States,” the indictment says.

But Trump wrongly claimed on Truth Social that the photo “clearly shows there was no ‘documents,’ but rather newspapers, personal pictures, etc.” He referred to this photo again in New Jersey, saying it shows that the boxes were “full of newspapers, press clippings, thousands of pictures.” There are newspapers and pictures visible in the photo, along with “visible classified information redacted,” the indictment says, which we can see as a black redaction mark at the top of one page.

In his Georgia speech, Trump also baselessly suggested the FBI might have turned over that box: “Somehow somebody turned over one of the boxes. … I said, ‘I wonder who did that? Did the FBI do that?’” The FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August, several months after Nauta reportedly took that photo — and texted it to another Trump employee.

Revisiting Clinton’s Emails

In arguing that he is being unfairly prosecuted, Trump has returned to distorting the facts about the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information while secretary of state. His allies have done the same.

A quick refresher: Clinton, who lost to Trump in the 2016 presidential election, used a private server to conduct government business. After an initial review, the inspectors general for the State Department and Intelligence Community referred the matter to the FBI to investigate a “potential compromise of classified information.”

The FBI investigation ended about a year later without any charges.

As we have written, the FBI reviewed about 45,000 of Clinton’s emails and found more than 100 that contained classified information at the time they were sent or received. Only three emails were marked with the letter “C” in the body of the email to indicate they were classified, according to then-FBI Director James Comey.

Comey described Clinton’s actions as careless — not criminal — when he announced on July 5, 2016, that he would not file charges.

“In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts,” Comey said. “All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.”

By contrast, the FBI investigation of Trump resulted in a 37-count indictment that alleges the former president did exactly what Comey described as actions that would justify criminal charges.

Trump has been charged with the “willful retention of national defense information” after he left office, including “information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries.” He also has been charged with counts of “conspiracy to obstruct justice,” “withholding a document or record,” “corruptly concealing a document or record,” and “concealing a document in a federal investigation.”

In speaking to supporters at his club in New Jersey after the arraignment, Trump accused Clinton of obstructing justice — even though federal agents found no evidence of it in her case.

“When caught, Hillary then deleted and acid-washed … 33,000 emails in defiance of a congressional subpoena,” Trump said. “The subpoena was there, and she decided to delete, acid wash and then smash and destroy her cell phones with a hammer,” Trump said. “And then they say I participated in obstruction?”

Trump said something similar in his June 10 speech in Georgia. “Hillary deleted and acid-washed 33,000 emails in defiance of a congressional subpoena. She already had the subpoena,” Trump said in Georgia. “And her aide smashed and destroyed iPhones with a hammer.”

Trump is referring to personal — not work-related — emails, and there is no evidence Clinton knew when or how they were deleted.

Here’s what happened: In response to a State Department request for work-related emails, Clinton’s lawyers conducted a review and gave the department 30,490 work emails in December 2014. There were another 31,830 private emails that Clinton said she no longer needed, and her attorneys asked a contractor managing Clinton’s server to dispose of them. But the contractor did not delete the personal emails until late March 2015 — according to the FBI’s two-part summary of its investigation — roughly three weeks after a GOP-led House committee served Clinton with a subpoena to produce emails related to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi in 2012. (For more, see “A Guide to Clinton’s Emails.”)

The FBI did recover nearly 15,000 of Clinton’s emails that had been deleted — including “several thousand” that were work-related, according to Comey. But the FBI “found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them,” he added.

As for Trump’s remark about Clinton’s aide using a hammer to destroy mobile phones, the FBI found (see page 9) that on two occasions a Clinton aide transferred data from old phones to new phones and then “destroyed Clinton’s old mobile devices by breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer.” This occurred while she was still in office – not during the FBI and congressional investigations. And, as we wrote, security experts interviewed by the technology website Wired said “physical destruction” is the “best way” to remove old data.

While the FBI found no evidence that Clinton tried to intentionally conceal evidence, that’s not the case with Trump. After being served a grand jury subpoena for classified documents in his possession, Trump allegedly conspired with a personal aide to conceal classified documents not only from the government but his own attorney who was charged with responding to the subpoena, according to his indictment.

Biden’s Boxes of Documents

In Georgia, Trump falsely suggested that Biden is “obstructing” a federal review of more than a thousand boxes of Biden’s U.S. Senate records, which the FBI has searched.

“And by the way, Biden’s got 1,850 boxes,” Trump said in Georgia. “He’s got boxes all over the place. He doesn’t know what the hell to do with them, and he’s fighting them on the boxes. He doesn’t want to give the boxes. And then they say, ‘Trump is obstructioning.’ He’s obstructing.”

In New Jersey, Trump similarly said Biden “refuses to give them up and he refuses to let people even look at them.”

In 2012, Biden donated over 1,850 boxes of records from his years as a senator to the University of Delaware, as we’ve explained before. At the time of the donation, Biden and his alma mater agreed that the materials would be publicly available “no sooner than the later date of December 31, 2019, or two years after the donor retires from public life.” 

But when Judicial Watch and the Daily Caller sought to gain access to Biden’s Senate records through Freedom of Information Act requests, a Delaware Superior Court judge ruled in October that the university did not have to comply with the requests. (Another hearing, before the Supreme Court of Delaware, is scheduled for June 14.)

However, the FBI, with Biden’s consent, did search the boxes of documents in January and February. Agents took “multiple boxes” of papers for further review, but none of them appeared to have classified markings, CBS News reported. 

Biden also consented to FBI searches of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, and his former Washington, D.C., office space, where documents with classified markings were discovered by Biden’s attorneys in the fall and winter. Biden’s vacation home in Rehoboth Beach also was searched, but the FBI found no classified documents.

As we’ve written, the documents found at Biden’s old office were turned over to NARA and then reported to DOJ, while DOJ investigators took possession of the documents found at Biden’s Wilmington home, including in storage space in his garage.

Biden’s FBI Access Request

On Truth Social on June 9, Trump shared a video clip of Fox News radio personality Mark Levin questioning Biden’s role in Trump’s documents case and misleadingly claiming that Biden had to “sign off” on the investigation.

“Is this some kind of a sick joke on the American people?” Levin asked on his June 8 show. “Joe Biden says he never told them what to do. Joe Biden had to sign off on this becoming a National Archives case, to have it go to the Department of Justice. Who does he think he’s lying to, the American people?”

In New Jersey, Trump went further, claiming without evidence that Biden “had his top political opponent arrested.”

As we’ve written, the Justice Department first became involved in February 2022 — not because of Biden, but because the NARA inspector general notified DOJ that hundreds of pages of classified documents were in the 15 boxes of documents that Trump’s team returned to NARA in January. “After an initial review of the NARA Referral, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) opened a criminal investigation,” according to the FBI affidavit that was used to get the warrant, authorized by a federal judge, which allowed agents to search Mar-a-Lago for unreturned documents on Aug. 8.

The FBI’s investigation began March 30, Trump’s federal indictment says.

So that the FBI and other intelligence officials could review the boxes of documents that NARA reported, DOJ, by federal law, asked the White House to submit a “special access request” to NARA. That’s because, under the Presidential Records Act, executive branch departments and agencies, under certain conditions, can request access to records in NARA custody through the sitting president, not through NARA.

NARA said the White House, via its counsel’s office, submitted the request on April 11, 2022, which was 12 days after the FBI’s criminal investigation began. Trump’s legal team then proceeded to block the FBI from gaining access by claiming the documents were covered by executive privilege, so Biden and the White House deferred a final decision to Debra Steidel Wall, NARA’s acting archivist at the time. She notified Trump’s team on May 10, 2022, that NARA would grant the FBI access to the 15 boxes of documents.

None of that means Biden signed off on “this becoming a National Archives case, to have it go to the Department of Justice,” as Levin claimed. The FBI already had started investigating how classified documents ended up at Trump’s property and whether any additional classified documents remained there in unauthorized locations.

There also is no evidence that Biden had Trump arrested, as Trump claimed.

Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury, based on evidence presented by Jack Smith, the special counsel that Attorney General Merrick Garland assigned to the investigation in November.

Biden told reporters on June 9 that he has not, and will not, talk to Garland about Trump’s indictment.

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The post Trump’s Distortions of Federal Indictment appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Quick Take 

A video artist posted an animation of a large rainbow coiling around and through the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on June 1 in celebration of Pride Month and support for the LGBTQ+ community. But posts on social media falsely suggested the rainbow had been physically installed and “defaced” the historic structure.

Full Story

In honor of Pride Month during June, some companies show support for the LGBTQ+ community by incorporating a rainbow into their branding — such as on a logo or merchandise —  or donating money to a nonprofit focused on issues related to the community. 

Ian Padgham, a video artist from California now living in Bordeaux, France, created an animation of a large rainbow installation coiling around and through the Arc de Triomphe — a monument in Paris to honor fallen soldiers — in celebration of Pride Month.

In the video, the rainbow appears to be attached to the Arc de Triomphe, and at the rainbow’s end is a cloud with the words “marche des fiertés” — which is French for Pride March, a parade scheduled for June 24 in Paris.

But posts on social media are using the video to falsely claim the Arc de Triomphe was “defaced” by the rainbow.

“The Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the iconic memorial opened in 1836 to commemorate war heroes and soldiers who died during wars has been defaced with a giant Rainbow to celebrate Pride,” said a tweet by Oli London, a spokesperson for the Fairness First PAC, a “parental rights” organization in the U.S. opposed to “radical gender ideology” in schools.

“Extremely disrespectful and appears to have been done by the city or some well organized vandals,” another Twitter user said in response to London’s tweet.

“Does any other fringe, minority group get so much attention – veterans, autistic, homeless, amputees, disabled, those with mental health and suicide issues? The answer is NO – ask yourself, WHY? Who/what is the machine behind this hard sell – and what an insult to the dead soldiers this represents,” read a Facebook post.

But as we said, the rainbow is a computer-generated animation, not a physical installation, and the French monument was not defaced or damaged in any way.

Padgham, whose other virtual creations in Europe and elsewhere appear on his Instagram page, shared the clip of the Pride Month rainbow on social media on June 1. One of his Instagram posts received more than 77,000 likes.

“Arc-en-ciel de Triomphe, Paris. Happy #PrideMonth everyone!!” Padgham said in a tweet. 

He explained to one Twitter user who assumed the artist had used artificial intelligence to create the video that he had, instead, utilized more traditional animation techniques. “No AI was used,” Padgham wrote. “Just me doing 3D animation and lots of hand-edited details.”

In a response to the false claims on social media, Padgham told the Associated Press, “The problem with social media of course is if something goes viral, you kind of lose control of the messaging.”

“If nothing else, this is a wake-up call to all of us that we’re entering into a period of history where we are not ready for just how bad misinformation is going to get,” Padgham said. “Most people immediately believe what they see.”

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

Ian Padgham (@origiful). “Arc-en-ciel de Triomphe, Paris. Happy #PrideMonth everyone!!” Twitter. 1 Jun 2023. 

Ian Padgham (@origiful). “No AI was used. Just me doing 3D animation and lots of hand-edited details.” Twitter. 1 Jun 2023. 

“History of the Arc de triomphe.” Paris Arc de Triomphe. Accessed 7 Jun 2023. 

Fairness First PAC. “Spokespeople.” Accessed 7 Jun 2023. 

Amidi, Sophie and Taj Shorter. “It’s Pride Month. Why Didn’t We Change Our Logo?” Plug and  Play. 3 Mar 2023.

Kis, Eva. “These Brands Are Still Flying the Rainbow Flag for Pride Month.” AdWeek. 2 Jun 2023.

Martin, Kendall. “Featured Flyer Spotlight: Ian Padgham.” Skydio. 10 May 2021.

Zeigler, Cyd. “These 6 pro sports leagues and 85 teams have changed their logos to Pride rainbow.” OutSports.com. 7 Jun 2023. 

Fichera, Angelo. “Video of massive rainbow installation at Arc de Triomphe was made using special effects.” Associated Press. 2 Jun 2023.

The post Posts Misrepresent Virtual Rainbow on Arc de Triomphe for Pride Month appeared first on FactCheck.org.

SciCheck Digest

Clinical trial data for Pfizer’s maternal vaccine to protect babies from RSV support the vaccine’s safety and efficacy, according to a vote by an FDA advisory committee. The FDA could soon approve the vaccine. But a popular social media post makes misleading claims about the trial findings.

Full Story

Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, causes a mild cold for most people, but infants – particularly young and premature babies – can experience severe infections. However, a vaccine to protect young babies could soon get approval by the Food and Drug Administration.

Building on a scientific breakthrough in the study of RSV about a decade ago, Pfizer has developed a maternal vaccine, to be given to pregnant people so that the antibodies they develop can be passed on to their babies. The results of the clinical trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed a vaccine efficacy of 81.8% against severe RSV-confirmed lower respiratory tract illness requiring a medical visit in the first 90 days after birth and an efficacy of 69.4% through 180 days after birth.

The vaccine is the same formulation as Pfizer’s RSV vaccine for older adults, who also are susceptible to serious and dangerous illness from the virus. The FDA approved the vaccine for adults age 60 and older on May 31, but it must separately consider the data on administering the shot in pregnant people to protect babies. On May 18, an FDA advisory committee voted affirmatively that the trial data supported the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine. The FDA’s decision on whether to approve it is expected to come in August, Pfizer said.

As we’ve explained in a Q&A article, RSV infects nearly all kids by the time they’re 2 years old, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. In addition to young and premature babies, infants with heart or lung disease, or weakened immune systems are particularly prone to severe illness. Dr. Mary T. Caserta, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Rochester Medical Center and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Infectious Diseases, told us the virus “is the most commonly identified cause of lower respiratory tract disease (pneumonia and bronchiolitis)” in infants. And “RSV bronchiolitis is the single most common cause of hospitalization in the first year of life in the US,” she said in an email.

Given the volume of misinformation that has circulated on social media regarding the COVID-19 vaccines, it may not be surprising that posts are beginning to appear questioning the safety of the RSV vaccine. One popular post, from a social media account that frequently posts about vaccines, raised “concerns,” but some of its claims are misleading or require more context.

Safety Data

One slide in the Instagram post listed percentages for adverse events reported in Pfizer’s clinical trial after vaccination, but it didn’t explain that the percentages were similar for those in the placebo group. And these adverse events are any health events that occur after vaccination, not necessarily events caused by the vaccine.

The peer-reviewed trial results said: “No safety signals were detected in maternal participants or in infants and toddlers up to 24 months of age. The incidences of adverse events reported within 1 month after injection or within 1 month after birth were similar in the vaccine group (13.8% of women and 37.1% of infants) and the placebo group (13.1% and 34.5%, respectively).”

Bar graphs published with those results show the percentages were also similar for events considered “serious” or “severe.” (Similar bar graphs were part of a Pfizer presentation to a CDC advisory board. See slides 19 and 20.)

Natalie Dean, assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics at the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health, told us that people, and particularly pregnant women, can have adverse events — regardless of whether they received a vaccine. “There’s a lot going on in their health,” she said. “A big strength of randomized trials is that we can separate out how often do these things happen at baseline for a placebo group … and then compare that with the vaccination group.” That comparison can “disentangle if there was any increase in adverse events that can be attributed to the vaccine.”

The phase 3 trial enrolled nearly 7,400 pregnant participants in 18 countries, with half receiving the vaccine and half getting the placebo; 45% of participants were in the United States. For the infants, 7,128 continued with the study and are being followed for up to 24 months of age.

There were very few adverse events that were considered to be related to the Pfizer vaccine. The FDA briefing document on the vaccine said that within 30 days after vaccination, 0.4% of adverse events reported in the vaccine group and 0.1% of adverse events in the placebo group were considered to be related to the injection by the investigator.

There were two adverse events from delivery through 1 month later that were “possibly” related to the vaccine, the briefing document said. One was eclampsia, or seizures that can occur in pregnancy, 15 days after vaccination, and the other was one premature delivery that resulted in a normal birth. Since there was no other cause for the premature delivery, the investigator leading the study said it would be “handled as related to” the vaccine.

Three other serious adverse event cases that occurred in the vaccination group through six months after delivery were considered to be related by the investigator: “[s]evere pain in multiple extremities,” which was resolved six days later; premature labor, which resolved in a day and resulted in a full-term pregnancy; and a case of lupus, with thrombocytopenia, a condition of low platelet count in the blood, attributed to the lupus.

For the infants, no serious adverse events “were considered related to maternal vaccination,” the briefing document said. But in one case of an infant death, the investigator assessed that it wasn’t related to vaccination while the FDA was “unable to exclude the possibility of the extreme prematurity and subsequent death being related.”

In all, there were five infant deaths (0.1%) in the vaccine group and 12 (0.3%) in the placebo group.

Preterm Births

In its briefing document, the FDA said there was a “numerical imbalance of 1%” in premature births between the vaccine and placebo groups, noting that the difference was not statistically significant. In the vaccine group, 5.7% of participants had a preterm birth, compared to 4.7% of the placebo group.

The difference for low birth weight also wasn’t statistically significant: 5.1% in the vaccine group and 4.4% in the placebo.

The Instagram post described this as “about 20% more preterm babies and low birth weight babies” in the vaccine group. There is a 20% difference between the two groups for the number of preterm births, but the figure requires context.

As we said, the difference for preterm births wasn’t statistically significant, though the FDA indicated its advisory committee — the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee — could discuss the imbalance in its May 18 meeting, which the committee did.

The rates of preterm birth in the trial were lower than the background rate of 10% of all births globally for 2020.

One premature birth was assessed to be “possibly related” to the vaccine. That’s the case mentioned above, in which the infant had “a normal birth outcome and no complications,” the FDA said. And, as we said, the FDA was “unable to exclude the possibility” that prematurity and the subsequent death of another infant were related to the vaccine.

About 90% of the preterm births in both the vaccine and placebo groups occurred at 34 to 37 weeks’ gestation (a full pregnancy is 38 to 42 weeks). That means most of the preterm births were only mildly premature, or what’s called “late preterm.” For what’s considered “extremely preterm birth,” which is less than 28 weeks, there was one infant in the vaccine group and one in the placebo.

The FDA advisory committee did discuss the preterm birth imbalance. While the vote was unanimous that the data supported the effectiveness of the vaccine, the vote was 10-4 on whether the data supported the safety. The committee members who voted “no” expressed concern about the data not providing enough certainty on whether the imbalance in preterm births was a safety issue.

One reason for the concern is that another pharmaceutical company, GSK, had voluntarily halted clinical trials of its maternal vaccine candidate due to an imbalance in preterm births. That imbalance wasn’t statistically significant in high-income countries in the trials, but it was in low- and middle-income countries, as we’ve written.

In the advisory committee meeting, Dr. Paul A. Offit, a vaccine expert and pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, asked whether the data was “adequate in terms of reassuring one that what was seen with GSK’s vaccine is not going to be seen here.” Offit said, “If you’re in any sense risking premature births with this vaccine, I think there’ll be a big price to pay, and so I guess I just don’t feel we have enough data to be reassuring.”

Others who voted in favor of the data supporting the safety of the vaccine noted that the imbalance in Pfizer’s trial wasn’t statistically significant.

Vaccine Doesn’t Contain the Virus

The Instagram post also highlighted a description of the placebo from the FDA briefing document that said the placebo was similar to the vaccine formulation “minus the active ingredients.” The post pointed to those words and misleadingly commented, “basically everything but the virus.”

It’s possible some may wrongly conclude from the post that the vaccine could infect people with the virus. It can’t.

Pfizer’s RSV vaccine is a protein subunit vaccine, which uses part of a protein of a virus, not the whole virus. Other vaccines, including those for hepatitis B and pertussis, are also protein subunit vaccines.

The RSV vaccine is made from pre-fusion F protein from RSV-A and RSV-B, subgroups of the virus. The pre-fusion F protein prompts an immune response in the body, but this fragment can’t cause RSV disease.

Pfizer’s vaccine, as well as other RSV vaccines, including one from GSK that also has been approved for older adults, target the pre-fusion F protein, thanks to scientific research published in 2013 by a team of scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. The scientists were able to stabilize the pre-fusion form of the virus’s F protein, which the virus uses to enter human cells, and determined that targeting that form — as opposed to the post-fusion form the protein takes once it fuses with cells — produced highly protective antibody responses.

Another option for protecting babies from RSV illness is also being evaluated by the FDA this year. A monoclonal antibody from Sanofi and AstraZeneca would be given as a single shot to newborns or infants before their first RSV season. The drug, which targets the pre-fusion F protein, was approved by the European Commission in 2022.

Vaccine Efficacy

The FDA’s advisory committee — VRBPAC by its acronym — is made up of experts in infectious diseases, immunology, pediatrics, biostatistics and epidemiology. Those experts voted unanimously, 14-0, that the clinical trial data supported the effectiveness of the Pfizer maternal vaccine in preventing RSV lower respiratory tract disease and severe disease in babies from birth to age 6 months. 

But a slide in the Instagram post featured a quote from a cardiologist, Dr. Peter McCullough, suggesting the data weren’t sufficient to show the vaccine was effective. McCullough, who has made false and misleading claims about the COVID-19 vaccines, first made these comments to a publication of Children’s Health Defense, a group that has spread vaccine misinformation and was founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Kennedy has taken a leave of absence from his position as chairman of the group to run for president of the United States.)

McCullough said the trial showed “only theoretical efficacy in babies” and that “less than 2% of infants at any time point contracted RSV.”

The trial didn’t measure all cases of RSV, but rather those that required medical attention from a health care provider and included rapid breathing, low blood oxygen and/or chest indrawing (see slide 24). Up to 180 days after birth, 2.5% of all infants in the trial had such a case of medically attended RSV.

In the vaccine group, 57 infants had medically attended RSV lower respiratory tract disease, compared with 117 cases in the placebo group. Those figures show an efficacy of 51.3%, meaning the vaccine cuts the risk of such disease by more than half.

The trial also measured cases of severe illness, which included more severe symptoms during a medically attended visit, being given mechanical ventilation or supplemental oxygen therapy, and certain ICU admissions. At 180 days, there had been 19 cases in the vaccine group and 62 in the placebo group, for an efficacy of 69.4%. At 90 days after birth, efficacy was even higher — 81.8%. (These figures are in Table 7 and 8 of the FDA briefing document.)

The case numbers might sound low to the general public, but they are sufficient to show vaccine efficacy — and scientists don’t expect to see very large figures in a trial, Dean, the biostatistician at Emory University, told us.

“We give vaccines to healthy people to prevent events that we hope are rare,” Dean said, and that’s why clinical trials need to enroll a lot of people. “We know the event itself is rare. But we just need to observe enough data to tell that the differences in rates of disease are real between the groups.”

The numbers may seem small, “but they’re big enough for statistics,” Dean said.

In his quote, McCullough also said RSV in infants is “uncommon,” “low-risk” and “easily treatable with nebulizers.”

But RSV is common in children and “causes a significant burden of disease,” Caserta, the American Academy of Pediatrics committee member, told us. While many infants will only have a cold from RSV, it can be dangerous for some.

As we said, the CDC says nearly all children will get RSV by the time they’re 2. Caserta also said studies have shown that over half of kids are infected by the age of 1.

Dr. Rebecca Schein, a pediatric infectious disease specialist with Michigan State University and an assistant professor at the university, noted that RSV “was part of the so-called triple demic that was filling hospitals last fall.” She told us: “RSV epidemics occur every fall and result in huge numbers of hospitalizations.”

The CDC estimates that 58,000 to 80,000 children under 5 are hospitalized each year because of RSV and that among every 100 babies under 6 months of age with RSV, 1 to 2 may need hospitalization. There are half a million emergency department visits and 1.5 million visits to outpatient clinics for kids under 5 each year. Deaths are “uncommon” in the U.S. — an estimated 100 to 500 each year for kids under 5, though the CDC says RSV-associated deaths are likely undercounted due to a lack of testing. In lower-income countries, death in infants is more of a concern; an estimated 45,700 babies up to 6 months of age worldwide died due to RSV in 2019, according to a systematic analysis of hundreds of studies published in the Lancet.

In addition to preventing hospitalizations and deaths from RSV through vaccination, “the bigger goal is to improve overall lung health of infants,” Dr. Barney S. Graham, a professor at Morehouse School of Medicine who was one of the leaders of the NIAID team that found the breakthrough on the RSV F protein, told Science in November. “If they’re infected with RSV very early in life and develop severe disease, that affects their lung development and overall lung health probably for their lifetime. So the goal here is to really improve overall lung health and that is something that’s hard to calculate until you’ve seen it evolve over several years.”

As for using a nebulizer, which changes liquid medicine into a mist that can be inhaled, Caserta said that a variety of nebulized treatments had been studied to relieve RSV symptoms, but “no clear benefit for preventing hospitalization or reducing hospital stay has been uniformly demonstrated.”

“There is no specific therapy for RSV infection,” she said. “Supportive care with oxygen and IV fluids as needed are the most common interventions used for hospitalized infants.”

Schein said that albuterol “is the most common nebulized medication and is used to treat asthma.” Its use in treating RSV “is minimal and only useful in infants with a predisposition to asthma.”

Finally, McCullough said that “[w]idespread use” of the RSV vaccine “can be expected to cause fetal loss in some unfortunate women,” but the clinical trial didn’t include any fetal losses due to vaccination.

In the trial, there were 10 fetal deaths in the vaccine group and eight in the placebo group, the FDA briefing document said. These were due to “various clinical conditions and presentations.” The FDA agreed with the assessment of the study investigator that none was related to the vaccine, “based on review of available case narratives and evident lack of temporal relation of vaccination to the fetal loss events.”

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

Schein, Rebecca. Pediatric infectious disease specialist, Michigan State University. Email interview with FactCheck.org. 9 Jun 2023.

Dean, Natalie. Assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, Emory University Rollins School of Public Health. Phone interview with FactCheck.org. 7 Jun 2023.

Caserta, Mary T. Professor of pediatrics, University of Rochester Medical Center. Email interview with FactCheck.org. 7 Jun 2023.

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The post Instagram Post Misleads About Pfizer’s RSV Maternal Vaccine appeared first on FactCheck.org.

On June 9, the Department of Justice unsealed a 44-page indictment against former President Donald Trump detailing allegations not only of mishandling sensitive classified documents after he left office, but of obstructing federal officials who tried to get them back.

In a brief public statement, Jack Smith, the special counsel who is bringing the case, said the indictment charges Trump “with felony violations of our national security laws as well as participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.”

“Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced,” Smith said. “Violations of those laws put our country at risk.”

Trump now becomes the first former president to face federal criminal charges. A summons compels him to surrender to authorities in Miami on June 13 for his arraignment.

“We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone,” Smith added.

Smith said his office would seek a “speedy trial … consistent with the public interest and the rights of the accused.” (For more on the investigation, see “Timeline of FBI Investigation of Trump’s Handling of Highly Classified Documents.”)

Here, we answer some questions about the indictment. What’s in it? What’s Trump’s response? And more.

What are the charges against Trump?

The indictment contains 37 felony counts – including violating Section 793(e) of Title 18, which is part of the Espionage Act. That section of the law makes it a crime to have “unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over” documents “relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”

The 37 charges include 31 counts of “willful retention of national defense information,” a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Additional counts of “conspiracy to obstruct justice,” “withholding a document or record,” “corruptly concealing a document or record,” and “concealing a document in a federal investigation,” all carry a maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment.

For the other two counts, a “scheme to conceal” and making “false statements and representations,” Trump, if found guilty, could be incarcerated for five years.

Each of the charges also carries a maximum fine of $250,000, as well as a maximum of three years of “supervised release,” or parole, after imprisonment.

What details are in the indictment?

According to the indictment, Trump had unauthorized possession of “information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries,” including the U.S. nuclear programs.

“The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States,” the indictment says, adding that Trump kept the sensitive documents “in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.”

On two occasions in 2021, Trump allegedly showed the classified documents to others. The government has an audio recording of one such instance, which occurred in July 2021 at his golf course in New Jersey, that involved documents about a planned attack on another country, reportedly Iran.

“Trump showed and described a ‘plan of attack’ that Trump said was prepared for him by the Department of Defense and a senior military official,” the indictment says of the July 2021 incident. “Trump told the individuals that the plan was ‘highly confidential’ and ‘secret.’ Trump also said, ‘as president I could have declassified it,’ and, ‘Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

About a month or two later, Trump allegedly showed a staffer at his political action committee “a classified map related to a military operation.”

The indictment also accuses Trump of obstructing justice and providing false statements.

It says Trump suggested that “his attorney hide or destroy documents called for by the grand jury subpoena,” as well as falsely claim that he did not have documents sought by the grand jury.

The indictment also describes how Trump hid boxes of documents from his own attorney after receiving the May 11, 2022, grand jury subpoena seeking documents “bearing classification markings.”

On June 2, in response to the subpoena, an attorney for Trump searched boxes in a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home and club, for classified documents. But, prior to the inspection, Trump directed one of his employees, Walt Nauta, “to move boxes of documents to conceal them from Trump’s attorney, the FBI, and the grand jury,” according to the indictment. From May 23 to June 2, “Nauta — at Trump’s direction — moved approximately 64 boxes from the Storage Room to Trump’s residence” and returned “only approximately 30 boxes” for the attorney’s review.

At Mar-a-Lago on June 3, 2022, another Trump attorney — who wasn’t involved in reviewing the boxes — provided government agents with “38 unique documents bearing classification markings,” and a sworn statement that said a “diligent search was conducted” for “all documents that are responsive to the subpoena.”

But, shortly after the visit, “the FBI uncovered multiple sources of evidence indicating” that Trump’s “response to the May 11 grand jury subpoena was incomplete and that classified documents remained at the Premises,” a court filing said. That evidence — including surveillance video showing Nauta moving boxes — resulted in the FBI obtaining a court-approved search warrant, which was executed on Aug. 8, 2022.

“During the execution of the warrant at The Mar-a-Lago Club, the FBI seized 102 documents with classification markings in Trump’s office and the Storage Room,” including 17 top secret documents, the indictment says.

The indictment also uses Trump’s own words against him. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump frequently attacked Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information. The indictment includes several examples of Trump promising during the campaign to “enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information.”

“No one will be above the law,” Trump said at that time.

Who is Walt Nauta?

Nauta, a member of the U.S. Navy who served as a valet in Trump’s White House and later as Trump’s personal aide, has also been indicted in the documents case.

According to the indictment, Nauta served as Trump’s “body man” starting in August 2021, and he was personally involved in moving around boxes of records at Mar-a-Lago — at Trump’s direction — to avoid their detection by not only the Department of Justice, but also Trump’s own attorneys.

Trump and Nauta “misled” a Trump attorney “by moving boxes that contained documents with classification markings so that [the attorney] would not find the documents and produce them to a federal grand jury,” according to the indictment. As we said, Nauta helped move approximately 64 boxes from a storage room to Trump’s residence, the indictment says.

The indictment says that under questioning by the FBI, Nauta also lied about that.

Nauta has been charged with violating federal codes related to conspiring to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheming to conceal, and making false statements and representations. The first four carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and the last two carry a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

What about Biden?

In a Truth Social post announcing his indictment, Trump quickly turned to whataboutism, lashing out at what he perceives as unequal Department of Justice treatment of Biden for doing what Trump says is the same or worse. But it’s not the same, and Trump’s claims are false and misleading.

Trump said he had been indicted, “even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is ‘secured’ by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time.”

As we have explained, in 2012 Biden donated more than 1,850 boxes of records from his years in the U.S. Senate to the University of Delaware. The documents are not available for public access following an agreement between Biden and the university at the time of the donation not to provide public access to any of the materials until “two years after the donor [Biden] retires from public life.” In October, a Delaware Superior Court judge upheld the University of Delaware’s refusal to provide access to the documents after the nonprofit Judicial Watch sought them through a Freedom of Information Act request.

However, the Justice Department, with Biden’s consent, reviewed the documents in February and did not find any with classified markings, although some were taken for further review, CBS News has reported.

As for the “additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C.,” Trump is referring to the revelation from Biden aide Kathy Chung that the boxes of documents taken from Biden’s vice presidential offices that ended up at the Penn Biden Center — and were later determined to contain classified documents — were previously and temporarily kept at two other locations, including one in Chinatown.

“He had seven or eight boxes in Chinatown in Washington, D.C., where nobody even speaks English in Chinatown,” Trump said at a Fox News town hall on June 1. “Chinatown is very — it’s in favor of China and he has boxes in Chinatown.”

Testifying before the House Oversight Committee in April, Chung said after the materials were initially boxed up at the end of Biden’s term as vice president, they were stored for six months at a space rented by the General Services Administration. The boxes were then moved temporarily — for about a month she said — to a private office space in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The boxes, which she said were unopened at both of the temporary storage locations, were then permanently moved to the Penn Biden Center in D.C. So despite Trump’s post, there are no longer any Biden documents being stored at the location in Chinatown.

It’s also misleading for Trump to say “even more” boxes were stored at the University of Pennsylvania. Those are the same boxes that were stored temporarily in Chinatown.

As we detailed in our Jan. 19 story, “Timeline of Biden’s Classified Documents,” Richard Sauber, special counsel to Biden, said in a Jan. 9 statement that on Nov. 2, while packing files in preparation for vacating office space used by the former vice president at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C., personal attorneys for Biden came across “what appear to be Obama-Biden Administration records, including a small number of documents with classified markings.” The University of Pennsylvania-affiliated think tank was established in 2017, after Biden was no longer vice president, and its offices opened in February 2018, about a year before Biden took a leave of absence to run for president. 

The office of the Penn Biden Center “was not authorized for storage of classified documents,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in remarks on Jan. 12. Garland said that on Nov. 9 the FBI began “an assessment, consistent with standard protocols, to understand whether classified information had been mishandled in violation of federal law.” Garland also noted that on Nov. 14, he tapped U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois John R. Lausch Jr. to conduct an initial review related to “the possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or other records” at the Penn Biden Center.

With Biden’s consent, the FBI searched the Penn Biden Center in mid-November. But the existence of even more classified documents came to light a month later when Biden’s personal counsel informed Lausch that additional documents from Biden’s time as vice president bearing classification markings were found in the garage of Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware. The FBI took possession of the documents.

Still more documents with classified markings were found by Biden attorneys in Biden’s home and garage in mid-January. At various points, the FBI searched the Penn Biden Center, as well as Biden’s homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, all with the consent and cooperation of Biden. According to CBS News’ reporting and what we know from statements by Biden’s lawyers, less than 30 classified documents were found in Biden’s possession at different locations.

On Jan. 12, Garland announced the appointment of Robert Hur as a special counsel “to investigate whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with this matter.” So the Biden mishandling of classified documents is not being ignored. The investigation has not concluded.

As we have written, there are significant differences between Biden’s situation and Trump’s. In Trump’s case, the search warrant was issued after months of negotiations and a grand jury subpoena resulted in only a partial return of classified documents.

We should note that Trump has repeatedly claimed that he is being held to a double standard compared with other past presidents who he says have done the same thing. But as we have written, that’s not accurate.

Do presidents have the authority to declassify documents?

On Truth Social, Trump shared a June 9 post from Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, who wrote: “The former president will be indicted for ‘mishandling’ his own government’s classified info. Yet everyone agrees the president has the authority to declassify anything.”

Yes, the president has the ultimate authority to declassify a document. As we’ve written: “The legal authority for classifying national security information rests in the president’s power afforded as commander-in-chief and is guided by a series of presidential executive orders, beginning with one issued by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. The latest of such orders, Executive Order 13526, issued in late 2009 by then-President Barack Obama, lays out in detail the procedures to declassify information, and the various officials who are to be included in such decisions.”

However, Trump’s representatives have made the dubious claim that he previously declassified all of the Mar-a-Lago documents via a “standing order” that said “documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.”

Multiple experts on national security and the law surrounding classified documents said that explanation isn’t plausible, and a number of former Trump administration officials said they had no knowledge of the former president issuing such an order when he was in office.

John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, told the New York Times in 2022 that the claim is “almost certainly a lie.”

Bolton told the Times he “was never briefed on any such order, procedure, policy” when he worked at the White House or after. “If he [Trump] were to say something like that, you would have to memorialize that, so that people would know it existed,” Bolton said.

In a phone interview, Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel for the National Security Agency during the Obama and Trump administrations, told us the standard procedure for declassifying information is “quite detailed.” He said a determination has to be made that the information is significant and in the public interest, followed by a determination that declassification wouldn’t pose a security threat if the information was revealed. The agency that initiated the classification would also be consulted for input on whether the information should remain classified. The agency’s recommendation would be considered by the president, who would then make a final decision, Gerstell said.

In addition, according to the indictment, Trump, in a July 2021 meeting at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf resort, admitted that he had not declassified at least one classified Pentagon document in his possession about attacking another country, reportedly Iran.

“[A]s president, I could have declassified. … Now I can’t,” a transcript of a recording of the conversation says. At another point, Trump tells those in the room, who did not have security clearances, that the document had been classified by the military. “Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” Trump reportedly said.

Can Trump continue to run for, or legally serve as, president if convicted?

“Yes, someone can run for president while under indictment or even having been convicted and serving prison time,” Josh Chafetz, a Georgetown University law professor, told us in March. “The reason is that the Constitution lays out the qualifications for being president.”

According to Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution, there are three qualifications to serve as president: He or she must be at least 35 years old upon taking office, a U.S. resident for at least 14 years and a “natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States.”

“These qualifications are understood to be exclusive,” Chafetz said. “Anyone can be president so long as they meet the constitutional qualifications and do not trigger any constitutional disqualifications.”

The 22nd Amendment states that “[n]o person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” But that wouldn’t apply to Trump, who has been elected only once.

Insider surveyed nine other legal scholars who reached the same conclusion. One of them, Harvard University Professor Laurence Tribe, told the news site: “Some presidents have described the White House as a prison, but the Constitution doesn’t specify that that’s the only prison you could occupy in order to serve as president.”

As an example, Chafetz cited Eugene V. Debs, the late labor leader, who, in 1920, ran for president from prison on the Socialist Party ticket and got almost 1 million votes.

What is the status of other Trump investigations?

In addition to handling the documents investigation on Trump, Garland has said Smith would also oversee the Justice Department’s ongoing probe of “whether any person or entity unlawfully interfered with the transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election or the certification of the Electoral College vote held on or about January 6, 2021.”

In addition, the Fulton County district attorney’s office is investigating whether Trump’s efforts to reverse the 2020 election outcome in Georgia amounted to a crime. In February, the jury foreperson of a special grand jury empaneled in Atlanta revealed that the grand jury recommended multiple people be indicted related to activities involving criminal interference in Georgia’s 2020 elections. Although the jury forewoman did not name those recommended for indictment, she said, “You’re not going to be shocked” by whom the list might include.

In mid-May, the Hill reported that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis asked judges in her county not to schedule trials and in-person hearings in the early part of August, in what many took as a sign that Willis will bring charges at that time.

And, of course, Trump faces an indictment in New York accusing him of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. In documents filed at Trump’s arraignment on April 4, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleged the falsified business records were meant to conceal hush money payments to three people alleging extramarital affairs by Trump, in furtherance of helping Trump’s presidential campaign.

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