CheckMate is a weekly newsletter from RMIT FactLab that draws on the work of its sister organisation, RMIT ABC Fact Check, to recap the latest in the world of fact checking and misinformation.
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CheckMate December 2, 2022
This week, CheckMate takes a detailed look at the latest piece of anti-vax propaganda, a conspiracy-laden film viewed millions of times online.
We also investigate the stoush between a Daniel Andrews challenger and the Victorian Electoral Commission after last week's election, and explain why you can expect to see more COVID-19 misinformation on Twitter.
Debunking Died Suddenly, an anti-vax video making waves online
A slapdash conspiracy film baselessly alleging that COVID-19 vaccines are causing large numbers of deaths, particularly in young people, has been viewed more than 10 million times in 10 days, despite many of its claims lacking evidence.
Died Suddenly, which was produced and uploaded online by controversial American media personality Stew Peters, suggests that COVID-19 vaccines have been deliberately designed as a depopulation tool.
But as CheckMate discovered, many of the claims used to make that argument are flimsy, incorrect or have been taken out of context.
Not all news is relevant news
The hour-long film suggests, for example, that a plethora of news reports about sudden deaths in otherwise healthy people proves the dangers of the vaccines.
Chad Whisnat, a funeral director featured in the film but about whom very little information is available online, says he was not an "anti-vaxxer" until recently.
"Somebody mentioned go on to Google and type in 'died suddenly' and find the news articles that pop up," Mr Whisnat explains in the film as a montage of Google news results is shown on screen.
"Low and behold, here's a whole listing of people, of articles of people within that last week who died suddenly."
But while Died Suddenly suggests a link to COVID-19 vaccines, CheckMate has found no evidence that this is the case in any of the deaths highlighted in the montage.
One headline highlighted in the footage, belonging to a Huffington Post article, reads: "My kind, compassionate son died unexpectedly. This is what I want you to know about grief." As the article details, however, the writer's son died in a car accident.
Another report refers to the death of a 33-year-old actor, who was confirmed to have died of injuries sustained in a fall.
Meanwhile, a headline announcing the death of a mother from a "preventable blood clot" is linked to an article explaining that the death occurred in February 2020, before COVID-19 vaccines became available.
Perhaps the most egregious example of a "death" included in the montage is that of Stadia, a Google-owned gaming platform that was shut down in September.
"Stadia died like Hemingway went bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly," a headline shown in the film states.
Indeed, of 22 headlines and articles included in the montage that were analysed by CheckMate, 10 were reports of deaths with known causes in no way linked to COVID-19 vaccines.
Another is a report, debunked by fact checkers at AAP, which incorrectly alleges 80 Canadian doctors died after receiving COVID-19 booster shots.
The other 11 reports feature deaths where there is no known cause of death, where no cause has been made public or where the cause was a heart issue that has not been publicly linked to COVID-19 vaccines.
'Deaths' footage far less sinister than implied
Later, the film presents a three-minute series of clips, mostly from security footage, showing people suddenly collapsing or convulsing in public.
These clips are interspersed with news reports about potential vaccine-related deaths to suggest that this is what viewers are seeing.
But despite the upsetting material, the film provides no evidence that these episodes were related to COVID-19 vaccines, nor that they led to death.
Saul Mullen, a neurologist with Melbourne's Austin Health, reviewed the sequence and told CheckMate that while it was impossible to make firm diagnoses from mostly very short snippets, he believed "the videos show a mixture of mostly clear seizures, some clear faints and some likely faints".
For example, he said, the first and most complete video shows a man standing at a counter whose head and eyes turn gradually and forcefully to the right.
"This is known as head and eye version and is a fairly specific sign of not just a seizure but one coming from the left side of the brain, the side that controls the right body."
The man then experiences what is likely a rarer "circling" or "tornado" seizure before developing a stiff right arm, Dr Mullen said, noting that this was again "typical of a left-sided epileptic seizure".
Another widely shared video circulated by fans of the film shows a Korean livestreamer experiencing a similar event.
The film, meanwhile, goes on to show multiple examples of what appear to be either simple faints or "more typical, generalised tonic-clonic [stiffening and convulsing] seizures", Dr Mullen said.
In such cases, he added: "The vast majority of people are just fine in a little while."
Indeed, although the film includes footage of a woman who faints and falls under a train, it leaves out the part where she emerges unscathed.
Another clip, of a man apparently having a seizure in a supermarket aisle, appears to originate from the website Reddit. But according to the user who uploaded it, someone helped the man to get up afterwards.
The trailer for the film includes footage of a US basketballer collapsing face-first onto the court — the day before the country's vaccine rollout began — though he is very much alive and well.
CheckMate also reviewed several examples of newsreaders losing consciousness while on air, finding one example (from Austria) that predated the pandemic, and at least two (from Mauritius and Singapore) in which the reporter was soon back on their feet.
A Brazilian news anchor indeed suffered a heart attack, but this was unrelated to his vaccination status.
Recycling the pandemic's greatest hits
The film also rehashes a number of problematic claims already debunked by CheckMate and other fact checkers throughout the pandemic.
At various points it makes reference to conspiracies about the World Economic Forum and the so-called "Great Reset", going so far as to suggest that a pandemic preparedness exercise held in 2019 offered proof that the COVID-19 pandemic was orchestrated by nefarious global elites — a claim that has persisted since early 2020.
Elsewhere, the film insinuates that Bill Gates plans to kill off part of the world's population using vaccines.
In fact, Mr Gates has advocated for sustainable population growth, arguing that vaccines could cut this growth by 10-15 per cent — because he says better healthcare tends to create both fewer deaths and fewer births.
The film interviews several funeral directors and embalmers who discuss the presence of blood clots in the dead bodies of people they say have been vaccinated.
But as fact checkers with AFP have previously explained, embalming is not the same as autopsy, and experts say clots could be caused by anything from obesity or smoking to infection with COVID-19 (or even the refrigeration of bodies).
To make its case, "Died Suddenly" relies on footage from 2019, which shows surgery of a pulmonary embolism being removed from a living patient — not a corpse.
Next, the film presents a chart showing steep falls in the birth rates of various countries, ostensibly since the vaccine rollout (though no dates are provided). Australia was the standout, with an apparent 70 per cent drop.
But as CheckMate explained last week, this shocking figure relies on data that is incomplete and can be explained by a regular lag in birth registrations.
There have indeed been falls in the birth rates of some countries, such as Germany, but there is no evidence to suggest this has anything to do with vaccines.
Several of the film's claims about a sharp rise in stillbirths have also been debunked by US fact checkers, who have shown there were not, for example, 80 stillbirths in Waterloo, Canada in 2021.
Likewise, a claim about stillbirths in a Calfornian hospital was taken apart by researchers with Factcheck.org, who found that the whistleblower's count conflated the number of stillbirths with that of miscarriages.
Notably, the gynaecologist who presents these figures has form when it comes to blaming fertility problems on COVID-19 vaccines without evidence.
The film also references a Pfizer post-market analysis that, according to another interviewee, showed that "83 per cent of all women who got vaccinated ended up with a dead baby". As Reuters has previously explained, however, the report has been frequently misrepresented and cannot be used to calculate percentages.
Victorian Electoral Commission sets the record straight on Premier's seat
Following Victorian Labor's election triumph last weekend, a challenger in Premier Daniel Andrews' seat of Mulgrave called for a recount after accusing the Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC) of botching the results in the electorate.
Independent candidate Ian Cook told 3AW's Neil Mitchell that a "whole heap" of his first preference votes "went and bolstered Andrews".
According to Mr Cook, this was because the VEC had decided that the Liberal Party candidate, Michael Piastrino, was the "second most likely candidate" to win in the electorate.
So what happened in Mulgrave?
Speaking to News.com.au, the VEC's director of communication and engagement, Sue Lang, said the commission "didn't give anyone's first preferences to anyone other than the candidate who was numbered one on the ballot paper".
The confusion has arisen over the two-candidate-preferred count, which the VEC has said is "for information only and has no bearing on the outcome of the election".
In a pre-poll video posted to Twitter, a spokeswoman for the VEC explains that before election day, the commission chooses the two candidates it thinks "are most likely to be in the lead" come election night.
"After we've completed our first preference, or primary, count for the district … we start the two-candidate-preferred count, where we distribute the other candidates' preferences to the two candidates we chose."
"Predicting who will be in the lead is not an exact science, and sometimes we get it wrong," the spokeswoman adds, somewhat presciently.
In Mulgrave, the VEC chose Mr Piastrino and Mr Andrews as the likely frontrunners and, as such, conducted an initial two-candidate-preferred count on that basis.
But as it turned out, Mr Cook ended up polling more first preference votes than Mr Piastrino (5,838 versus 5,070).
Ultimately, the VEC's slip-up did not matter, as Mr Andrews secured an outright majority on first preference votes alone (as of Thursday, he had collected more than 51 per cent of them).
A spokeswoman for the VEC told CheckMate that revised two-candidate-preferred counts — and indeed the formal distribution of preferences to other candidates — are only conducted in cases where no candidate receives a majority of primary votes.
Twitter quietly ditches COVID-19 misinformation policy
Twitter will no longer be enforcing its COVID-19 misleading information policy, according to an update posted to the policy's web page.
As CNN reported this week, the change did not appear to have been formally announced by the platform, which instead quietly added a note to a page on its website.
"Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy," the note reads.
The move comes after online misinformation expert Timothy Graham warned last month that Elon Musk's takeover of the platform was set to have a "seismic impact" on the spread of misinformation.
"I and other researchers are gravely concerned by these trends," he told CheckMate.
Edited by Ellen McCutchan and David Campbell
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