CheckMate is a weekly newsletter from RMIT FactLab which recaps the latest in the world of fact checking and misinformation, drawing on the work of FactLab and its sister organisation, RMIT ABC Fact Check.
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CheckMate August 19, 2022
This week, CheckMate investigates an implied link between Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and a menacing-looking photo of an official holding what appears to be an automatic rifle on a beach in … Brazil.
We also tackle a viral post that argues COVID-19 antibodies do not make their way to the lungs, and unpack a "tremendously dangerous" set of claims on vaccine harms.
Photo of heavily armed police wrongly implies Dan Andrews link
With the Victorian election just three weeks away, criticism of Premier Daniel Andrews's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic is surging online, but not all of it is grounded in reality.
A photo, for example, showing a heavily armed official speaking to a woman and two children on a beach has been misleadingly captioned to suggest the interaction took place in Victoria, despite no evidence that this was the case.
"NEVER FORGET," reads the text overlaid on the image, along with "#sackdanandrews".
But CheckMate, in collaboration with online misinformation researchers at the Information Futures Lab, has discovered that an uncaptioned version of the photo has been circulated by Brazilian-based Twitter users since early 2021.
While some Victorian police officers patrolled bayside beaches at the height of the pandemic, all signs point to this photograph having been taken in Brazil.
The earliest instance of the image found by CheckMate was from March 23 that year, in a tweet written in Portuguese and posted in response to a Brazilian article about local lockdowns and supposed "crimes against humanity".
A hashtag accompanying another post, dated April 1, translates from Portuguese to "the people are with Bolsonaro", a reference to the then-Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who was fervently opposed to COVID-19 restrictions.
The image was also shared to Instagram on April 9, 2021 by Mario Frias, at the time a Bolsonaro government minister, who captioned the photo: "Cowardice!!!"
In the weeks prior, with Brazil reporting more than 1,000 daily COVID-19 deaths, Mr Bolsonaro had spoken out against pandemic-related lockdowns. (He later reiterated his position after the country recorded more than 4,000 deaths in just 24 hours.)
Despite the president's opposition, however, some regions of Brazil did lock down, including the city of Araraquara, which closed even supermarkets and petrol stations in order to stop the spread of the virus, as reported by Bloomberg.
Beaches, too, were impacted by COVID-19 restrictions. As news site EuroNews reported, shops and stalls on Rio de Janeiro's famous Copacabana beach were shuttered and police patrols "stepped up".
Sérgio Lüdtke, a Brazilian journalist and misinformation researcher, told CheckMate he believed the photo showed a member of the military police from Brazil's Ceará state (Polícia Militar do Ceará).
"[W]e believe that it is probably a video frame and is related to the context of the pandemic when several police actions were taken to ensure isolation measures implemented by state governments," said Mr Lüdtke, who is also editor-in-chief of the fact-checking collaboration Projeto Comprova.
"One of the most common [measures] was guarding coastal beaches when access was limited and bathing was prohibited."
Photos posted to Instagram by the Polícia Militar do Ceará (and sent to CheckMate by Information Futures Lab researchers) show similarities between the state's police uniform and that of the official shown in the image.
CheckMate found no evidence to suggest the photo was taken in Australia.
Experts shoot down viral claim that says COVID-19 antibody ‘has no path' to the lung
A Californian eye surgeon has launched a series of viral posts accusing senior US health bureaucrat Dr Anthony Fauci of covering up "the biggest mistake in medical history".
In a tweet shared nearly 10,000 times, the surgeon claimed that COVID-19 vaccines simply don't work because "[t]he COVID antibody has no path into the lung".
"Wasn't that the whole point of the vaccine? To help the LUNG in an infection?", he questioned in a subsequent tweet.
But experts have dismissed his claim.
Paul Griffin, an infectious diseases physician and associate professor with the University of Queensland, told CheckMate it was "completely false".
In fact, some COVID-19 antibodies do get into the lungs following vaccination, he said, which helps to reduce the number of people getting infected.
Menno van Zelm, laboratory head at Monash University's Department of Immunology, similarly countered that antibodies were "secreted in the lung after vaccination [and] clearly present after vaccination".
There were, however, "lower levels" found in the lungs than in blood samples, he added.
There were also fewer antibodies present in the lungs after vaccination than after infection, Professor van Zelm said, explaining that, since the vaccines were not administered via the lungs, the immune response was "not really generated at the site where it's needed".
Still, he said, "any antibodies would make a difference".
Importantly, Professor van Zelm said there was more to the body's immune response than antibodies alone, pointing to the role of vaccines in generating so-called memory cells.
These cells quickly recognise the coronavirus spike protein and "make sure there's a very rapid response in making additional antibodies" when the virus appears.
As for whether COVID-19 vaccines are effective, Dr Griffin said that the fact they don't prevent infection 100 per cent of the time "shouldn't be seen as a failure".
"We know that this vaccine works well at preventing severe disease, and that's mediated through other mechanisms, not necessarily having high antibody levels in the lungs."
Professor Van Zelm, too, said that the vaccine's effectiveness had been borne out by clinical trials and the vaccine rollout itself.
"So, whether or not there's antibodies in the lung, the vaccines have been shown to work."
Eminent academic misleads on vaccine risks
Anti-vax groups have seized on comments made by an eminent political scientist and former UN assistant secretary-general after he made a string of problematic claims about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in an article published in The Australian.
In a multi-pronged fact check, RMIT FactLab this week tackled five of the biggest claims, finding them to be mostly false or lacking context.
Sharon Lewin, the director of Melbourne's Doherty Institute, said Ramesh Thakur's article was spreading "misinformation" and was "tremendously dangerous".
"The author has confused the issues and presented a ton of numbers that appear scientific but the interpretation is incorrect," Professor Lewin told FactLab.
Among the claims made by Professor Thakur was that vaccination was likely to harm children's ability to fight off reinfection from COVID-19.
But those arguments were rebuked by a key author of a scientific paper cited in the article, who labelled them a "misrepresentation" of the study's findings.
The paper in question includes two charts comparing unvaccinated and vaccinated children previously infected with the Delta variant of the coronavirus, which appear to show that protection against reinfection declined faster among the vaccinated, falling from 95 per cent to zero within six months.
However, the study's co-author, Danyu Lin, told FactLab that the protection afforded by a previous Delta infection was actually "higher among vaccinated children" than among unvaccinated children during the first three months.
Beyond three months, "there was insufficient data" to make an accurate assessment, he said.
And when it came to the more prevalent Omicron variant, Professor Lin said the protection conferred by previous infection "was much higher among vaccinated children than among unvaccinated children".
Next, the article's author had relied on a flawed comparison to claim that the risk of myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, among vaccinated teenagers was nearly triple the risk of death from COVID-19.
"The issue here is that myocarditis doesn't kill you," Professor Lewin said. "Myocarditis from vaccination is generally transient and mild, so comparing this relatively rare and transient adverse effect from a COVID vaccine to death from COVID makes no sense."
Moreover, the source of this particular claim was British cardiologist Aseem Malhotra, who has repeatedly fallen foul of fact checkers with Health Feedback, FullFact, AFP Fact Check and Reuters for making unsupported claims about COVID-19 vaccines.
Indeed, fact checkers previously found that one of Dr Aseem's papers, which was cited by Professor Thakur, had cherry-picked evidence, relied on flawed studies and failed to acknowledge research showing that vaccines were safe and effective.
As for the professor's claim that Pfizer's vaccine trial showed more deaths in the vaccinated group than the placebo group, FactLab pointed out that these figures reflected deaths from all causes, not specifically from the COVID-19 vaccine.
"The Pfizer report states that none of the deaths in the trial were considered to be related to the vaccine by investigators," the fact checkers wrote. "Causes of death included cancer, dementia, and a stroke."
FactLab covers the claims in greater detail here.
Edited by Ellen McCutchan and David Campbell, with thanks to Sarah Liversidge
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