Did Dr. Sherri Tenpenny make a case that the COVID-19 pandemic, treatments and mitigation efforts are a global government plot to kill people -- a "democide" -- or a plot to transform people into genetically modified "transhumans" who are externally controlled and without God? No, that's not true: The controversial osteopathic medical doctor, marketer and evangelist from Ohio repeated many…

Do COVID-19 vaccines cause patients to suffer by triggering them to produce spike proteins throughout the body, including the brain, lung, heart, bone marrow and reproductive organs? No, that's not true: The claim was made without citation to peer-reviewed, independently confirmed research, raw data or checkable specific examples. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has declared the vaccines…

Are vaccine-makers Moderna and Pfizer not mandating the COVID-19 vaccine for their employees? No, that's not true: Since August 2021, Moderna and Pfizer have had COVID vaccine requirements in place for their U.S. workers. Medical and religious accommodations are available on an individual basis. The Pfizer mandate also extends to its contractors. The claims appeared in multiple social media posts…

On November 10, 2021, Lead Stories published a fact check about an article published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on November 2, 2021. In response, the BMJ published an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg on December 17, 2021, calling our fact check "inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible." We addressed their concerns in a December 18, 2021, article, going over their…

Do COVID-19 vaccines for children fail risk/benefit analysis, permanently damaging children's brains and reproductive systems to prevent a harmless infection? No, that's not true: The claim is made without scientific evidence to support it and in the face of data showing some children are killed and seriously sickened by COVID. Meanwhile, the consensus of published, peer-reviewed and field tested expert…

Are COVID-19 vaccines "dangerous and ineffective" and do they "need to be withdrawn from the market"? No, that's not true: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the vaccines are "safe and effective." More than 535 million doses of COVID vaccines have been administered in the United States since December 2020. Serious adverse events are rare, and reports of…

Did Dr. Robert Malone correctly claim in a speech that COVID-19 vaccines are not working, that they cause infertility and that vaccine makers are protected legally while families are not? No, that's not true: The vaccines have prevented serious illness and death for millions. Studies have shown the vaccines do not cause infertility and there is a compensation system for…

Did researchers discover "various foreign objects" -- like worms hatching from eggs -- in the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine? No, that's not true: None of the listed ingredients in the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine are intentionally harmful. The claim, which originated in this article published January 8, 2022, by the RAIR Foundation, reappeared in an article (archived here) published by Liberty Planet…

Are COVID-19 boosters weakening the immune system? No, that's not true: Articles and social media reports saying that Marco Cavaleri, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) vaccine strategy chief, fears repeated booster shots would weaken the immune system are incorrect. The EMA press office said, "It seems a journalist misunderstood the comments made by Dr. Cavaleri at the EMA's press briefing…

Did hackers "crack" the servers of COVID-19 vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna and reveal vaccine death data from those companies? No, that's not true: The data used to make that claim is from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a database that keeps a record of reported but often unconfirmed adverse effects. VAERS data does not prove a correlation…