Nor is it suggesting using the Mental Health Act to section people who refuse the vaccine

13 Nov 2020 | Facts and news from Full Fact
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FACT CHECK
Covid-19 vaccine: the government is not proposing to make it mandatory

We’ve seen a number of posts on Facebook that claim a government document proves that the Covid-19 vaccine will be mandatory and the government will use the Mental Health Act to section people who refuse the vaccine.

This is not the case. The document in question was not written by the government—it was submitted by academics at the Universities of Oxford and York to a parliamentary committee about how Covid-19 may affect human rights.

It recommends that the government “give serious consideration to compulsory immunisation,” but this is in no way government policy, or even being proposed by the government.

Vaccines are not mandatory in the UK, and Health Secretary Matt Hancock recently said that the government is not proposing to make any future Covid-19 vaccine mandatory.
What does the document say? ([link removed])
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FACT CHECK
Newspaper makes baseless claims of US voter fraud ([link removed])

The Daily Express published a comment piece alleging evidence of widespread ballot fraud in the US election. There is no evidence to support this.

The piece was written by Patrick Basham, director of a London and Washington-based think tank called the Democracy Institute, and has since been removed from the paper’s website.

He wrote: “If you don’t include the fraudulent ballots, most pollsters failed on a spectacular scale… If only valid votes are counted, Trump and Biden share the popular vote. Already, there is a mountain of evidence, direct and circumstantial, of widespread ballot fraud.”

Since the election, President Trump and his supporters have made multiple allegations of voter fraud. Twitter marked claims of widespread fraud as “disputed”.
What do we know about voter fraud? ([link removed])
The latest episode of the Full Fact Podcast is out now! ([link removed])

From the so-called “moon landing hoax” to the Queen secretly being a reptile, conspiracy theories are everywhere. With the advent of social media, it’s never been easier to share them.

But why do people believe them? On the latest episode of our podcast, we explore this with Professor Karen Douglas, an expert in the psychology of conspiracy theories.

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FACT CHECK
MP’s claim about testing cost was out by factor of ten ([link removed])

At Prime Minister’s Questions, Labour MP Ruth Jones claimed that the Welsh contact tracing programme cost £32 per person while the English system cost £1,700 per person.

This is wrong.

Full Fact asked Ms Jones for the source of her data. A spokesman confirmed the figure for England came from a tweet which was miscalculated.

The Welsh cost of £32 per head was arrived at by dividing the £102 million the Welsh government allocated to contact tracing by the population of Wales (roughly 3.15 million people).

The figure for England was calculated by dividing the £12 billion provided for Test and Trace by an approximation for the population of the UK. Even then, this figure covers the cost for the whole of the UK, not just England, so can’t really be compared to the Welsh figure in this way.

However, doing the calculation properly actually gives a per head figure for England of around £177, not £1,700.

It appears that the original tweet rounded the per head figure down from £177 to £170, and then accidentally added a rogue zero.
A fair comparison? ([link removed])
MORE FACT CHECKS
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* Group swab Covid-19 tests do not return positives to people without the virus ([link removed])
* What does the new lockdown mean for childcare in England? ([link removed])
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