FactCheck.org's Weekly Update

At the White House, the Health and Human Services secretary left the misleading impression that the FDA’s decision to revoke its emergency use authorization of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for COVID-19 “removes a potential barrier” and makes it easier to access the drugs. The FDA’s action does the opposite.

In the days leading up to President Donald Trump’s first campaign rally since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, Trump and his supporters are making false and misleading claims about COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and testing.

President Donald Trump continues to draw false distinctions between mail-in and absentee ballots, claiming the former are rife with voter fraud while the latter — which he has used as president — require a voter to go through “a very strict process, the equivalent of going to a voting machine, or maybe even sometimes better.”

In signing an executive order on policing issues, President Donald Trump falsely claimed former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden “never even tried to fix this during their eight-year period.” The Obama administration took several steps to address police violence and community trust issues, some of which the Trump administration has dialed back.

During a visit to Iowa, Vice President Mike Pence made several false claims about President Donald Trump’s handling of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Former Vice President Joe Biden wrongly says “most of the conservative think tanks,” including the Heritage Foundation, agree that the tax cuts championed by President Donald Trump “generated virtually no growth at all.”

Posts on social media cite an anonymous Craigslist ad to support the false claim that President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is seeking “MINORITY Actors” to hold signs at his June 20 rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Trump campaign says it didn’t post the ad, and Craigslist has removed it.

Headlines on social media misleadingly suggest that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi violated a military tradition when she gave a folded flag to the brother of George Floyd. A folded flag is not “Reserved Only For Fallen Veterans,” as one headline claims. Members of Congress routinely present flags that have flown over the U.S. Capitol as gifts.

A Facebook post is spreading the false claim that former President Barack Obama gave $3.8 million to a lab in Wuhan, China. The money referenced was actually provided to a U.S. research group. Only $600,000 went to the lab as part of a U.S.-approved collaboration. 

A meme misrepresents a 2007 criminal case in Houston involving George Floyd. The meme distorts the details of Floyd’s case and includes a photo of a woman who was badly injured in an unrelated attack in Spain in 2018.

A conspiracy theory on Facebook is falsely claiming that the killing of George Floyd was “filmed before covid19” because “[n]ot a single person is wearing a mask” in the videos. Some of the officers and officials in the videos can clearly be seen wearing masks.

A tweet that suggests a conspiratorial “pattern” — from the protests over George Floyd’s death, to the pandemic, to the presidential impeachment, to the 2016 election – is being falsely attributed to former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The tweet is actually from an unverified Twitter account that misspelled her name.