The father of the vaccine-autism myth is back with a new report pushing the same false claim. By counting studies of varying quality and methods as if they were equal, the report is like "a mountain of garbage," according to one expert. Read more here: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/claim-dism...

President Donald Trump’s pick for Surgeon General, Casey Means, has spread multiple provably false and potentially dangerous health claims — from the debunked myth that vaccines are linked to autism to the perilous claim that raw milk has health benefits.

Chemtrails still aren't real, even when there's a government shutdown. Read the latest from NewsGuard's Reality Check: newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/the-end-of...

Conservative social media accounts are baselessly claiming that Tylenol overdoses among pregnant women are increasing because liberals are taking large amounts of the medication to spite President Donald Trump. Read more with NewsGuard's Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/pregnant-w...

In less than 24 hours, there were 38,000 posts on X mentioning both “Amish” and “no autism,” according to a social media analytics tool used by NewsGuard. www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/bogus-vacc...

The head of a new federal task force charged with reviewing the safety of COVID-19 vaccines has spread multiple false claims about the vaccines, including saying that the vaccines are responsible for an “unprecedented level of harm.” www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/cdcs-new-v...

"According to misinformation tracker NewsGuard, the campaign...takes advantage of high-profile events to pump out fabricated content from various publications, including ABC News, BBC and most recently POLITICO." www.politico.com/news/2025/08...

RFK Jr. justified canceling mRNA vaccine funding by saying COVID vaccines: -"encourage new mutations" -"don't perform well" against respiratory viruses -"pose more risk benefits" All of those claims are false. More in NewsGuard's latest Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/rfk-jr-cit...

NewGuard has become the target of a Kremlin-backed propaganda operation. We’ll take the impersonation and baseless accusations of bribes to be confirmation we’re doing something right. www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/russias-la...

New from NewsGuard: Natural health influencers are recycling the long-debunked myth that staring at the sun will miraculously improve your eyesight. Recent TikToks promoting the dangerous practice have garnered 100,000+ views. Read more here: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/hoax-cure-...

"The research, conducted through NewsGuard's newly launched Reality Gap Index in partnership with YouGov, surveyed 1,000 Americans and found that only 7 percent of those surveyed could correctly identify all three false claims as untrue." newsweek.com/newsguard-st...

Since his first confirmation hearing, RFK Jr. has spread 12 provably false health claims in government hearings, media appearances, and on social media that have collectively amassed 25 million views on X alone, according to a NewsGuard analysis. www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/rfk-jr-get...

ICYMI: Researchers said RFK Jr.'s HHS twisted their work to justify shift on COVID vaccines during pregnancy. HHS' response was to suggest NewsGuard was dismissing "significance of the underlying data," even when the study authors said HHS was wrong. www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/researcher...

A HHS and RFK Jr. memo to Congress cited multiple studies to justify the agency’s new recommendation that pregnant women should not get a COVID vaccine. But the actual study authors who spoke to NewsGuard said HHS misrepresented their work. www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/researcher...

One of the U.S. government’s new advisors on vaccine recommendations, Dr. Robert Malone, is a frequent source of vaccine misinformation, including the false claims that COVID-19 vaccines can cause cancer and increase the risk of stillbirths. www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/the-myths-...

Anti-Vaxxers Resurface Myth that COVID-19 Vaccines Cause Miscarriages www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/anti-vaxxe...

Joe Biden is not suffering from COVID vaccine-induced "turbo cancer" -- because that's not a real thing. After Biden's cancer announcement on Sunday, it took only nine minutes for the first posts falsely blaming COVID vaccines to surface on X. www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/biden-not-...

Contrary to claims pushed by RFK Jr.'s anti-vaccine group, none of the primary additives used to fluoridate water in the U.S. are included in a public, searchable database of substances that the EPA classifies as hazardous waste on its website. newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/no-the-epa...

NewsGuard’s depository of false health-related claims advanced by RFK Jr. and the anti-vaccine nonprofit he founded has now hit 103. Check out the whole list and subscribe to NewsGuard’s Reality Check while you’re at it: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/provably-f...

NewsGuard's health team often talks to experts when looking at complicated claims. This week, one expert didn't want his name used out of fear of being targeted by "a hit-list for grant cuts." Read more (and subscribe!) from NewsGuard's Reality Check: newsguardrealitycheck.com/i/162124066/...

A new analysis by Stanford epidemiologists predicts that measles could become endemic again in the US in the next 20 years. This would be a catastrophic failure and a result of anti-vax propaganda. Measles is a vaccine-preventable disease that was declared eliminated in the US in 2000.

Some X and Telegram users, citing comments from RFK Jr., are falsely claiming that studies debunking vaccine-autism claims have not compared vaccinated and unvaccinated children. In reality, multiple studies have done so, dating back to the 90s. www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/rfk-jr-spa...

No, Dr. Fauci does not want to kill your cats to fight bird flu. All Fauci did was accurately note that H5N1 has infected cats -- which a frequent misinfo source stretched into a cat-killing conspiracy. More from NewsGuard: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/anthony-fa...

Anti-vaxxers are mixing up correlation and causation (again) with the Texas measles outbreak, falsely claiming that an uptick in MMR vaccinations after the outbreak started means the vaccine itself is to blame. www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/higher-mea...

RFK Jr.'s anti-vax group is now blaming the measles death of a 6-year-old on "medical error" -- all based on records the public can't see and a re-diagnosis by Dr. Pierre Kory, best known for falsely promoting ivermectin as a COVID cure. The video racked up 1.2 million views in 5 days.

Frequent misinformation source Peter McCullough is pushing the same faulty measles math that NewsGuard covered in a recent Reality Check. VAERS reports don't prove causation — and you know why measles deaths are so rare in the U.S.? Vaccines. newsguardrealitycheck.com/i/159060459/an…

“Friday was my last day leading communications at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I left my job because I believe public health policy must always be guided by facts and not fantasy.” Kevin Griffis writing in WaPo about what it was like to work under RFK Jr

NY Times covered the story. Kennedy claims he did not know and instructed them to take the website offline. I'm going to need more information. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/h...

Have you seen this chart floating around X, along with some text saying it proves that the Texas measles outbreak coverage is "propaganda" or "panic?" That kind of portrayal relies on some monumentally misleading math. (1/2)

New from NewsGuard's health misinfo team: If you've seen this chart from anti-vaxxers recently, claiming measles vaccines cause more deaths than measles, it's based on one of their favorite sources to misrepresent: VAERS!

Nine paragraphs of Dave Weldon's statement about his pulled CDC nomination are spent defending Andrew Wakefield and the retracted 1998 study that kickstarted the vaccine-autism myth. Weldon claims Wakefield "had not done anything unethical." UK GMC says otherwise. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

New from NewsGuard: RFK Jr.'s anti-vax allies are falsely blaming vaccines for the Texas measles outbreak, even though state health authorities have said the infections were caused by a wild-type measles strain and most cases are among the unvaccinated. www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/vaccines-f...

Following the first US measles deaths in 10 years, RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine group is pulling a page out of the COVID misinformation playbook.

"As of Feb. 14, 2025, Musk’s X posts advancing claims that NewsGuard analysts determined are false have cumulatively gained 825.2 million views and 4.8 million likes." www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/musks-28-f...

NewsGuard just published its most comprehensive audit of AI and misinformation to date, revealing that genAI models are more likely to generate false claims in Russian and Chinese than in other languages. Read NewsGuard's multilingual audit: www.newsguardtech.com/ai-monitor/j...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearing for Secretary of Health and Human Services resurfaced the debunked claim that Lyme disease is a bioweapon engineered in a U.S. government lab. Read it in Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/i/156379078/...

My latest column just appeared in Science, entitled "Free speech, fact-checking, and the right to accurate information”. (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) I use one of President Trump’s first executive orders to unpack the terrain between misinformation and claims to free speech 1/n

Related to this LA Times controversy: The paper’s owner recently spread a false claim about polio vaccines containing mercury — in defense of RFK Jr. NewsGuard has more in our latest Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/hoaxsters-...

The book "Cause Unknown" was published by RFK, Jr.'s anti-vaccine group in 2022. It argues that COVID-19 vaccines caused sudden deaths. On the cover the tragic death of 12-year-old Braden Fahey is shown. There's just one problem. Braden Fahey was never vaccinated for COVID-19.

An interview with LA Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong spread polio vaccine misinfo after he falsely claimed that "old versions" of the jab contained mercury. In fact, no polio vaccine ever has. Read more from NewsGuard's Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/i/156193358/...

In a 2021 interview, RFK Jr.'s provably false claims included: -COVID vax trials included 20 patients over 70 (actually 3,000) -AZT killed more people than AIDS -Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine can treat COVID Read the fact-checked interview here: www.newsguardtech.com/special-repo...

NewsGuard found that even with Meta’s fact-checking initiatives in place, the vast majority of posts advancing foreign disinformation narratives spread without carrying any of the fact-checking labels used by Meta. www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/special-re...

Only 14% of posts spreading Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation narratives on Meta platforms were flagged as false under the fact-checking program that Meta is soon ending in the U.S, NewsGuard finds. Read the full report in Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/special-re...

Conspiracy-oriented social media users are baselessly claiming that Gov. Gavin Newsom, State Farm insurance’s CEO Jon Farney, and Hollywood elites conspired to ignite the California fires to cover up tunnels supposedly built beneath LA to traffic children. Read it in Reality Check:

Today in NewsGuard's Reality Check: All the false LA wildfire claims, Pro-Kremlin social media share doctored MSNBC clip, and what the heck is Fogvid-24? www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/la-wildfir...