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** How a Vaccine Safety System Is Misused
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If you’ve ever been exposed to any anti-vaccination content -- particularly claims that purport to cite scary-sounding statistics -- there’s a good chance that it’s based on a distortion of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS.

VAERS is a frontline vaccine safety system co-run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. It’s essentially a database of unverified reports of health problems that occurred sometime after vaccination, which agency scientists use to detect unusual patterns and identify possible vaccine safety signals.

But because this raw data is public, and the reports are easily misunderstood as being caused by vaccination -- even though they are frequently coincidental -- the system has become a favorite of the anti-vaccination community, which weaponizes the data to falsely claim vaccines are dangerous.

As Dr. Paul A. Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told us, VAERS “is just manna from heaven to get bad information out there.”

We’ve written about VAERS many times before, but now, Science Editor Jessica McDonald has compiled all the information in one place -- and runs through five key misconceptions that anti-vaccination activists wield to mislead people about vaccines.

In addition to Offit, the story features interviews with CDC’s Dr. Tom Shimabukuro and biostatistician and former FDA official Dr. Susan Ellenberg, who is now at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.

For more, read "What VAERS Can and Can’t Do, and How Anti-Vaccination Groups Habitually Misuse Its Data ([link removed]) ."
HOW WE KNOW
Crime is a perennial issue in political campaigns -- which has been particularly true in recent years. For crime data, we use the FBI's Crime Data Explorer, ([link removed]) a user-friendly website that provides crime statistics from thousands of law enforcement agencies from around the U.S. It doesn't include all crime data, because the reporting system is voluntary. But it is the best available data for national crime statistics.
FEATURED FACT
The Trump administration built 458 miles of “border wall system,” according to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection status report on Jan. 22, 2021. But most of it, 373 miles worth, was replacement barriers for primary or secondary fencing that was dilapidated or outdated. About 52 miles of new primary wall and 33 miles of secondary wall were built where no barriers had been before. Read more ([link removed]) .
WORTHY OF NOTE
Jessica McDonald, FactCheck.org's science editor, traveled to New York City to speak to journalism students in New York University's Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting program ([link removed]) on June 6.

She was one of four guest speakers who talked about the challenges and rewards of fact-checking. Topics included how to fact-check for a magazine or podcast, how writers can strive to be more accurate, as well as fact-checking as a journalistic endeavor -- FactCheck.org's specialty.
REPLY ALL

Reader: Are former presidents allowed to take classified documents home in order to sift out personal information for up to two years?

FactCheck.org Director Eugene Kiely: No. We wrote about this issue in "Former Presidents Are Not Allowed to Take Home Official Records ([link removed]) ."

In that story, we explained that the Presidential Records Act, or PRA, governs the maintenance of presidential records. We consulted with Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, who told us that the PRA was “enacted to ensure that the American people — not the president — own records created or received by a president when in office.”

“A president has no legal right to tear up, shred, or otherwise dispose of copies of records that he creates or receives while in office (including his own notes or annotations on documents concerning official business),” Baron said.

He noted that the PRA allows a sitting president to dispose of official records only after consulting with the archivist.

As for personal records, the Congressional Research Service says in a 2019 report ([link removed]) that the PRA allows for personal records to be classified separately from official presidential records and that “the President has a high degree of discretion over what materials are to be preserved under the PRA.” Personal materials -- which are identified in the PRA as documents “of a purely private or nonpublic character”— are excluded from preservation requirements.

However, the president's discretion only applies to when he or she is in office. CRS says, "After a presidency, the responsibility for the custody, control, preservation of, and access to presidential records shifts to the Archivist." A former president cannot take records home and determine two years later what is a presidential record and what is a personal record. CRS says: "In the event of potentially unlawful removal or destruction of government records, Title 44, Section 3106, of the U.S. Code requires the head of a federal agency to notify the Archivist, who initiates action with the Attorney General for the possible recovery of such records. The Archivist is not authorized to independently investigate removal or recover records."

In former President Donald Trump's case, both NARA and Trump have referred to the recovered material as official presidential records - not personal records - so your question about personal records doesn't apply to Trump. However, the removal of presidential records does apply to Trump.


** Wrapping Up
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Here's what else we've got for you this week:
* "FactChecking Pence’s Presidential Announcement ([link removed]) ": Mike Pence formally jumped into the 2024 presidential race on June 7, becoming the first vice president in 83 years to challenge a president under whom he served. We fact-checked his remarks on the day he announced his candidacy.
* "FactChecking Chris Christie’s Presidential Announcement ([link removed]) ": Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie kicked off his campaign for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination with a June 6 town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire. We fact-checked his remarks, which included false or misleading claims about former President Donald Trump, the current Republican front-runner, whom Christie attacked several times.
* "FactChecking Haley’s CNN Town Hall ([link removed]) ": Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley — a former governor of South Carolina and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during former President Donald Trump’s administration — made a few false and misleading statements in a June 4 town hall on CNN.
* "A Florida School Restricted Access to Amanda Gorman’s Poem, But Didn’t ‘Ban’ It ([link removed]) ": Following a parent’s complaint, one K-8 school in Florida restricted access to a poem by Amanda Gorman that she had read at the 2021 presidential inauguration. The school moved the book in its library to a shelf for upper-grade students only. But social media posts falsely claimed Miami-Dade County had “banned” the book in all its elementary schools.
* "Biden Officials Have Taken Oaths of Office, Contrary to Social Media Claim ([link removed]) ": Officials serving in President Joe Biden’s administration have taken their oaths of office, and most can be seen in videos from their swearing-in ceremonies. But a video circulating on social media falsely suggests that they haven’t been sworn in and are “acting as elected officials without swearing an allegiance to the Constitution.”
* "Trump’s Dubious Promise to End Birthright Citizenship ([link removed]) ": Former President Donald Trump misleadingly said that “under Biden’s current policies” children born to parents in the country illegally automatically become citizens. That’s not a Biden policy, but rather it has been the standing interpretation of the 14th Amendment going back more than 100 years, including under Trump.

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