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PeakMetrics / Fact Checks

Health & medicine fact checks

Explore claims publishers have checked about health & medicine. Read their original ratings and follow the evidence.

13,674 published reviews in this topic

dpaHealth & medicine

De Jonge werd al meerdere keren gevaccineerd.

Publisher’s rating: De online berichten doen het lijken alsof al deze foto’s van een coronavaccinatie waren. Dat is echter onjuist. De twee foto’s waarbij De Jonge geen mondkapje draagt zijn gemaakt bij het krijgen van de griepprik in 2018 en 2019.

The claim arose from a social-media collage showing then-caretaker minister Hugo de Jonge receiving injections in three photos. The accompanying question—how often he had been vaccinated—could suggest that every image showed a coronavirus vaccination. The review distinguishes the fact that the images show three vaccination occasions from the implication that they were all COVID-19 shots. The review reports that De Jonge received his first coronavirus vaccination on 4 June 2021, when his birth year, 1977, became eligible. The photo at the lower right of the collage corresponds to that vaccination, and he is wearing a face mask in it. The other two photos show him without a mask and predate the pandemic, so they do not document additional coronavirus vaccinations. The review identifies those other images as photos De Jonge posted on his Twitter account on 1 November 2018 and 9 December 2019. Each was accompanied by encouragement for healthcare workers to get a flu shot. Thus, the collage does show De Jonge being vaccinated on multiple occasions, but its images span different years and include flu shots as well as the 2021 coronavirus vaccination.

dpaHealth & medicine

Als vaccinaties echt effect zouden hebben, was IC-bezetting nu veel lager dan vorig jaar.

Publisher’s rating: Die vergelijking is misleidend en mist alle context. Er zijn tal van factoren die meewegen. Cijfers laten juist zien dat vaccinaties wel degelijk een effect hebben op de sterk afgenomen IC-bezetting. Bovendien is het seizoenseffect dit jaar een paar weken later dan vorig jaar.

The claim compares Dutch ICU occupancy with the same point in the previous year and treats the higher 2021 figure as evidence that vaccination was not working. The review checked the graph’s figures against the government’s Coronavirus Dashboard. It says the comparison was numerically accurate: on 1 June 2021 there were nearly 300 more people in intensive care than on 1 June 2020. But that comparison alone does not establish what caused the difference. The review examined the timing of both the decline in ICU occupancy and warmer weather. It reports that occupancy began falling on 12 April 2020, compared with 6 May 2021. It also describes checking historical weather records: in 2020, temperatures first exceeded 20°C on 6 April, while in 2021 a longer warm period began on 28 May. This timing means the seasonal contribution to the decline was not aligned across the two years. The review also presents evidence that vaccination was reducing severe illness among older people. It cites LCPS chair Ernst Kuipers’s observation that people over 80 were scarcely affected by the fourth wave, and dashboard figures showing hospitalisations in that age group falling sharply from late March, when more people over 80 had received a second dose. The review further reports that the RIVM described a change in the age profile of ICU patients in the second half of May, and that ICU director Diederik Gommers attributed that change mainly to vaccination. Its conclusion is that the higher year-on-year occupancy does not show vaccination had no effect: the later seasonal effect, and possibly weaker adherence to restrictions, also mattered.

dpaHealth & medicine

En résumé l'efficacité absolu des vaccins n'excède pas 1,4 % !

Publisher’s rating: Le post en question manque de contexte. La publication de The Lancet énumère une série de pourcentages sur l’efficacité des vaccins contre le Covid-19, notamment ceux relatifs à la « réduction du risque absolu ». Mais cette statistique ne veut pas dire que les vaccins ne sont pas ou peu efficaces.

The claim concerns a Facebook post asserting that Covid-19 vaccines’ absolute efficacy is no more than 1.4%, based on a publication in The Lancet. The review identifies the cited item as a commentary in The Lancet Microbe dated 20 April 2021. It says the authors were discussing how vaccine-efficacy figures are presented, not reporting new scientific findings. The post’s figure also does not match the review’s account of the commentary: it gives the absolute risk reduction as 1.3% for AstraZeneca, alongside 1.2% for Moderna, 1.2% for Johnson & Johnson and 0.84% for Pfizer/BioNTech. Those absolute-risk figures describe a different measure from the relative-risk reductions commonly cited for the vaccines. The review reports relative-risk figures of 95% for Pfizer/BioNTech, 94% for Moderna, and 67% each for Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca. It explains that relative risk compares the risk in a vaccinated group with that in an unvaccinated group, whereas absolute risk reduction measures the percentage-point difference in risk across the study population. The two values can therefore be quite different without contradicting one another. The review illustrates the distinction with two groups of 100 people: ten unvaccinated people and one vaccinated person become ill. In that example, the absolute reduction is 9 percentage points, while the relative reduction is 90%. It says the Lancet commentary argued that both measures should be presented for a fuller picture, and that the authors did not conclude that vaccines were ineffective. The post’s use of an absolute-risk figure alone therefore does not establish that vaccines provide little or no protection.

dpaHealth & medicine

hécatombe, suite au vaccin AstraZeneca

Publisher’s rating: Même si un lien a officiellement établi entre l’administration du vaccin développé par AstraZeneca et la survenance de très rares cas de thrombose, elle n’a pas provoqué « d’hécatombe ». L’Organisation mondiale de la santé (OMS), l’Agence européenne des médicaments (EMA), le Royaume-Uni ou encore la Belgique jugent que les effets bénéfiques du vaccin l’emportent largement sur les risques d’effets secondaires graves.