Originally published here.
A video showing dozens of trucks driving through a town and honking was shared thousands of times alongside claims it shows Italian truckers inspired by a convoy of Canadians who drove to Ottawa in 2022 to protest Covid-19 vaccine mandates. This is false; the video was taken in September 2021 during a city festival in the Piedmont region of Italy.
Social media posts have shared a photo purporting to show a mass demonstration against Covid-19 restrictions in the Austrian capital Vienna in November 2021. The claim is false; the image was taken in Moscow in 1991, during a protest against then Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.
Social media posts and online articles claim European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for scrapping the Nuremberg Code and forcing people to receive a Covid-19 vaccination. But she made no mention of the Nuremberg Code when questioned about moves to require vaccination in some European countries, instead suggesting a “discussion” and “common approach” to implementing policies.
Social media posts circulating in multiple languages claim World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned some countries were administering vaccine booster shots in order to “kill children”. The posts spread online in December as countries around the world saw record surges of Covid-19 cases, likely driven by the Omicron coronavirus variant. But a review of Tedros’ actual remarks found he was in fact discussing global vaccine inequity — not commenting on the safety of Covid-19 vaccine boosters. A representative for the WHO told AFP that Tedros stuttered when delivering his remarks.
Global news agency Reuters published an article that said a Japanese company found ivermectin to be effective against the Omicron variant of the coronavirus in human trials. The article was corrected to say that trials were non-clinical, meaning they did not test on people, but social media posts are still spreading the article’s original incorrect assertion that the drug was proven effective against Covid-19 in human test subjects.
As the highly contagious Omicron Covid-19 variant pushed governments to speed up rollouts of booster jabs, social media posts purported to share a poster issued by Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) warning that the vaccines “cause Bell’s palsy”. The claim is false; Britain’s health department and local authorities in the town where the poster was displayed said it was not made by the NHS. Bell’s palsy, a condition that causes temporary facial drooping, is a rare side effect of Covid-19 vaccines.
A segment of the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony has been misrepresented in social media posts that claim it shows a “giant figure of death holding a needle” foreshadowing the Covid-19 pandemic. The claim is misleading; the cloaked figure in the ceremony was a puppet holding a wand, representing Harry Potter’s antagonist Voldemort, who appeared alongside various villains from children’s literature.
Social media posts feature a photo of tractors blocking a highway and claim that it shows a convoy in the Netherlands inspired by truckers protesting Covid-19 vaccine mandates in Canada. This is false; the photo appeared online in a 2019 article about farmers protesting enviromental regulations before the pandemic started.