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A hearty congratulations for making it through April, which felt like a century. For me, that’s been due to the exhausting amount of COVID-19 misinformation I’ve been sifting through.
A Facebook post alerted readers to this “breaking news”:
“President Trump just announced that the ‘biological’ lab in Wuhan where the COVID-19 virus was created was ‘funded’ by President Barak (sp) Hussein Obama in 2015 to the tune of $3,800,000 American dollars! This fact directly links Obama to all 150,000 deaths around the world!”
A different post makes a similar point: “Well well well, in 2015 Obama gave the Chinese lab in Wuhan 3.7M grant to study the corona virus what a coincidence.”
The first post builds on the conspiracy theory that the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China created the virus.
There’s nothing correct in this post, although President Donald Trump does play a supporting role in spreading some of the inaccurate information at the heart of the claim.
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Facebook post claims that COVID-19 is here to stay
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Is COVID-19 America’s leading cause of death?
North Carolina health secretary Mandy Cohen said, “Covid-19 is now the leading cause of death in the United States.” This claim needs context. Read the fact-check»
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Alex Mahadevan is a senior multimedia reporter at MediaWise. He can be reached at amahadevan@poynter.org or on Twitter at @AlexMahadevan. Follow MediaWise on TikTok.
