FACT CHECK Misinformation resurfaces about pregnancy and Covid vaccines
Many Twitter users have claimed that the government has quietly changed its advice on Covid vaccination during pregnancy.
This isn’t true. The advice hasn’t changed recently and the NHS still recommends that you get vaccinated against Covid if you’re pregnant or breastfeeding.
The confusion seems to have arisen from a document warning against vaccinating during pregnancy that says it was “updated 16 August 2022”. But this document itself doesn’t appear to have been recently updated. It’s part of a wider group of documents concerning regulatory approval of the Pfizer vaccine, which features another document that has been updated.
At the time of that report’s publication (December 2020) there wasn’t enough data on use of the vaccine during pregnancy and breastfeeding. By April 2021, it was deemed that enough evidence was available to recommend the vaccine to those groups. That advice remains in place now.
So essentially, this ‘new’ document is actually an old document from before there was lots of real-world data about the vaccine being safe for pregnant women.
This week, another fake tweet attributed to the Culture Secretary was shared thousands of times on social media.
The fabricated tweet supposedly showed Ms Dorries suggesting that this winter people use cats and dogs for warmth. But she said no such thing, and the screenshot was faked.
But what was quite telling, was the response to our fact check:
We had dozens and dozens of messages echoing similar sentiments. But these views could be coloured by people seeing other false quotes attributed to Ms Dorries, thinking they were real.
In April, we debunked a fake tweet that supposedly showed her saying that “food doesn’t grow on trees”. It went viral again this week, with thousands and thousands of shares from people believing it to be genuine.
It’s always a good idea to scrutinise claims that backup your own opinions about someone or something. Especially with something like a screenshot of a tweet, because there are really easy ways to work out if it’s real or not.
In this instance, you can of course go to Nadine Dorries’ Twitter page and check to see if the tweet is there or not. If it’s not, then you can also check to see if it’s been deleted by checking something like Deleted by MPs.
Doing this before you share will only take a few seconds and can help prevent the inadvertent proliferation of false information.
A Daily Mail headline reporting the findings of a new study reads: “Tea cuts early death risk.” But the study in question only shows correlation between the two, not causation.
The study found that participants who drank two or more cups of tea a day were less likely to die of any cause. But it did not show drinking tea was the reason for this.
Study author Dr Maki Inoue-Choi is quoted in the Daily Mail as saying the study is “observational”, which means it’s impossible to say whether tea drinking itself or other factors associated with a higher likelihood to drink tea were behind the lower mortality risk.
We contacted the Daily Mail about this and it published a correction in its print edition yesterday.
