Does this group photo of women with prosthetic limbs depict female veterans who were wounded in battle? No, that's not true: These Brazilian women were gathered to model for a photoshoot that was part of a campaign by a prosthetics company. The photos were for a 2016 calendar intended to raise money to pay for prosthetics for people in need,…
Did President Ronald Reagan say, "Any attempt to disarm the people must be stopped, by force if necessary"? No, that's not true: It was the 19th Century revolutionaries Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, co-authors of the Communist Manifesto, who originated this quote in a joint address to the Central Committee to the Communist League in London in March, 1850. These…
Did police in Germany arrest YouTuber Dr. Andreas Noack for speaking out against the government's handling of the coronavirus pandemic? No, that's not true: Local police in the state of Bavaria confirmed that a raid took place, but said it was not directed at Noack. The chief prosecutor's office, the Generalstaatsanwaltschaft in Berlin, confirmed that the house search was part…
Does a meme purporting to show the population and number of votes cast in Milwaukee, Detroit, Pittsburg and Lansing show the correct numbers for the 2020 election? No, that's not true: the numbers showing higher vote counts than population totals were made up, the actual vote counts in the places where city-level data was available was lower than the population…
Did the Denver Broncos sign Colin Kaepernick to play quarterback on Sunday, November 29, 2020, after all of the team's quarterbacks were ordered into quarantine for COVID-19 exposure? No, that's not true: The same NFL COVID-19 protocols that benched all four of Denver's quarterbacks would also prevent Kaepernick from suiting up on short notice to play in the Bronco's game…
Did a judge give Pennsylvania's legislators the power to choose presidential electors? No, that's not true: Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough issued a memorandum to explain to the state Supreme Court what her thinking was when she ordered a temporary halt to the certification of Pennsylvania election results while the petition to declare a mail-in voting law unconstitutional was litigated.…
Do masks, gloves, vaccines, and synthetic handsoaps suppress human immune systems? No, that's not true: Public health experts and medical research say the opposite is the case and the claims were made with no evidence in a meme that spread to hundreds of thousands of Instagram users in the midst of a COVID-19 surge that saw more than 160,000 new…
Does medical research show COVID-19 is not transmitted in the air and that infection risk is unaffected by distance? No, neither claim is true: The claims ignore the accumulating recent evidence that airborne coronavirus is the major mode of infection. The claims ignore scientists' peer-reviewed conclusions -- which are based on what the full universe of study data show --…
Did the mail-in vote count (2,589,242) in the presidential election in Pennsylvania exceed the actual number of ballots sent to voters (supposedly 1,823,148) and were 1,126,940 votes "created out of thin air"? No, that's not true: The Pennsylvania Department of State's website for election returns shows that about 2.6 million mail-in ballots had indeed been counted as of November 27,2020.…
Is Dominion Voting Systems vice president Eric Coomer missing and has the company closed its headquarters? No, that's not true: A video repeats unfounded claims Lead Stories has previously debunked: that Dominion Voting Systems has shuttered its headquarters amid unfounded and rebutted claims that the company manipulated election results in favor of Joe Biden over Donald Trump. There is no…
Is it true the lethality of COVID-19 is being overblown by government mortality data, and was a Johns Hopkins University student paper censored when it posted a story about that claim? No, that is not true. There is no evidence that official COVID-19 death tallies have hidden some other cause of unexpected deaths in 2020. The student paper's retracted article…
Did President Trump seemingly confuse recently deceased soccer superstar Diego Maradona with singer Madonna? No, that's not true: the tweet in which the President seemingly made comments praising Maradona's music from the 1980's was a crude fake. It never appeared on his Twitter feed. An example of the fake tweet can be seen in this Facebook post (archived here). The…
Did someone photograph a stack of boxes labeled 'Boneless Pork Rectums' which also bore a sticker that appears to be the McDonald's logo? No, that's not true: This photo of boxes, without the McDonald's logo, appears to be a real photo that dates back to at least 2007. The photo already had quite a long viral run before the crudely…
Did 8.1 million people vote in Michigan in the general election when there were only 7.8 million registered voters? No, that's not true: 5,579,317 people voted in Michigan out of the 8,061,525 registered voters there were as of October 2020. The claim appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) where it was published on November 21, 2020 with the caption,…
Is it true that Pfizer's vaccine candidate to battle COVID-19 is made and stored in such a way that scores of people could be severely sickened or even killed by its use? No, that is a conspiracy theory not supported by scientific studies. According to vaccine experts and literature, the use of PEG -- polyethylene glycol --- in Pfizer's potential…
