|
|
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
|
|
Feeding Babies at the Border
The baby formula shortage has caused a raft of misleading and false claims, but here's one that is true: The federal government feeds babies detained in immigration facilities at the southwest border.
We have received dozens of questions from readers about this, including one that reporter Saranac Hale Spencer answered in our latest Ask FactCheck: "Has the Biden administration sent 'pallets' of infant formula to the border amid a nationwide shortage?"
The short answer is: Yes. And Sara explains why.
A body of law -- composed of federal statutes, court settlements and regulations -- governs the care of minors detained in immigration facilities. So, yes, the Biden administration is providing baby formula, as legally required, to immigrants brought across the border illegally.
Despite this legal requirement, some Republicans turned feeding babies at the border into a partisan issue.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, who replaced Rep. Liz Cheney as the House Republican conference chair, tweeted: “Joe Biden continues to put America LAST by shipping pallets of baby formula to the southern border as American families face empty shelves.”
Read the full story, "Border Patrol Required to Provide Formula to Detained Infants."
|
|
|
|
|
The bogus claim that COVID-19 vaccines contain microchips has been circulating for most of the pandemic. (Yes, it's back again.) But there is an easy way to check the ingredients of vaccines. The full ingredient list for any authorized COVID-19 vaccine can be found on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website and in a variety of documents on the Food and Drug Administration website, including in a fact sheet for vaccine recipients that’s available in numerous languages. We write about that in "How do we know what ingredients are in a vaccine?" In that piece, we provide links to fact sheets for the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
|
|
|
|
The World Health Assembly, the governing body of the World Health Organization, adopted the International Health Regulations in 1969 in response to deadly epidemics in Europe. The legally binding agreement, which was last revised in 2005, requires WHO members to have health system capacities to detect, assess and respond to dangerous public health emergencies, and that they notify the WHO of emergencies that may be of international concern. Still, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only about a third of the countries in the world “have the ability to assess, detect, and respond to public health emergencies.” Read more.
|
|
|
|
|
Cecil Hannibal -- the morning anchor at WAPT, an ABC TV affiliate in Jackson, Mississippi -- interviewed FactCheck.org Director Eugene Kiely about social media misinformation.
The segment featured our article about a Mississippi-based nonprofit called Operation Ukraine. Social media posts falsely suggested that Operation Ukraine's shipments of baby formula to Ukraine caused the formula shortage in the U.S.
Hannibal also spoke to Enock Nyariki, who is the community and impact manager at the International Fact-Checking Network, for his report.
For more, watch "What happens when a viral social media post spreads damaging misinformation?"
|
|
|
Reader: How many school bombings have occurred since the Bath bombing in 1927?
FactCheck.org Director Eugene Kiely: We haven't counted school bombings since then, but I did find a 2005 report by the Arizona State University Center for Problem-Oriented Policing that said: "For the period January 1990 to February 28, 2002 the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) recorded 1,055 incidents of bombs being placed in school premises."
The ATF issues annual explosives incident reports, which include information on four categories: explosions, recoveries, suspicious packages and hoaxes. The report for 2021 said that "education facilities" were the targets of 571 bomb threats and 60 recoveries (meaning the explosion devices were discovered). But it did not say how many actual explosions occurred at educational facilities in 2021. I couldn't find any information about explosions in the 2020 report, either.
In the 2019 report, however, the ATF said there were a total of 251 bombing incidents reported in 2019, including six at educational facilities. That was double the three explosions at education facilities in 2018, the report said.
As for school shootings, a topic which has been in the news with the horrible shooting in Texas, we did an article in May 2019 that reviewed school shooting incidents from Dec. 14, 2012 -- the day of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut -- through 2018. We counted 64 school shootings during that time. We based our count on the FBI’s list of active shooter incidents, the database of school shootings kept by researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security, and the list kept by Everytown, a group that advocates for reducing gun violence.
We include a map with details on each of the 64 school shootings in our story.
Since then, there have been two other mass shootings at schools, according to a database of mass shootings that is maintained by Mother Jones. One of the two, of course, is the tragic mass murder at the Uvalde elementary school in Texas. The other was at Oxford High School in Oxford, Michigan, on Nov. 30, 2021. Four were killed and seven injured in that shooting.
That would bring the number of school shootings since the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary to 66.
|
|
Wrapping Up
Here's what else we've got for you this week:
- "‘WHO Has No Authority to Dictate U.S. Health Policy’": The World Health Organization can make recommendations after the declaration of a global emergency, but it has no control over any nation’s decisions. Yet conservatives in the U.S. falsely claim that amendments proposed by the Biden administration to existing global health regulations, and a new WHO pandemic treaty, will threaten U.S. sovereignty.
- "FDA-Approved ‘Electronic Pill’ Isn’t Evidence That COVID-19 Vaccine ‘Microchip’ Conspiracy Is ‘Proven’": COVID-19 vaccines don’t contain microchips and have readily available ingredient lists. But social media posts use an old clip of the Pfizer CEO talking about an “electronic pill” to leave the false impression he was confirming a conspiracy theory about microchips in the vaccines.
- "Social Media Posts Make Baseless Claims About Gender Identity of Uvalde Shooter": Police are still investigating the shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, but as of May 26 they had shared no evidence about the shooter’s gender identity. Despite that lack of evidence, Rep. Paul Gosar and others claimed the gunman was transgender. Social media posts making the baseless claim have shared photos of a person unrelated to the attack.
- "Some Posts About NIH Royalties Omit Fauci Statement That He Donates His Payments": A nonprofit recently reported that, since 2009, the National Institutes of Health and many of its scientists received an estimated $350 million in royalties for developing experimental treatments. Some kept the money, but Dr. Anthony Fauci has said that he donates royalties he receives to charity — a detail left out of some online posts about the payments.
- "Post Misleadingly Blames Shipments to Ukraine for Baby Formula Shortage in U.S.": A Mississippi-based nonprofit has sent shipments of baby formula to Ukraine since Russia invaded the country. A social media post misleadingly suggests the shipments are responsible for the formula shortage in the U.S. But the shortage has been due to supply chain problems, a product recall and the temporary closure of a manufacturing plant.
Y lo que publicamos en español (English versions are accessible in each story):
|
|
|
Have a question about COVID-19 and the vaccines? Visit our SciCheck page for answers. It's available in Spanish, too.
|
|
|
|
|
|
