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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.

13,677 published reviews in this topic

PolitiFactHealth & medicine

"Zero Amish children diagnosed with cancer, diabetes or autism."

Publisher’s rating: Pants on Fire

Related research in the supplied material addresses the autism part of the claim, not all three conditions. One excerpt says an investigation found an autism rate among Amish children of “one in 15,000” and reports that no evidence of autism was found in Amish communities in Indiana, Kentucky, or Ohio. It also recounts reports from doctors: one said he had never seen a case among thousands of Amish patients, while another found an Amish child with autism who had received routine childhood vaccines. Taken together, those details do not support the absolute assertion that no Amish child has been diagnosed with autism. The excerpt does not identify the investigation, describe how it counted diagnoses, or provide underlying records or a date for its findings. Nor do the supplied excerpts establish whether Amish children have been diagnosed with cancer or diabetes. A separate excerpt asserts that autism is absent from Amish communities but supplies no supporting method or data. Thus, the material offers limited counterevidence to the autism portion of the claim, but is not enough to assess the claim’s cancer and diabetes portions or to establish a comprehensive count across the three diagnoses.

FactCheck.orgHealth & medicine

"[T]his administration inherited a broken system, a system [for coronavirus testing] that was obsolete, a system that didn’t work. It was okay for a tiny, small group of people, but once you got beyond that, it didn’t work.”

Publisher’s rating: Misleading

The claim concerns President Donald Trump’s statements in March 2020 that his administration inherited an obsolete, broken coronavirus testing system that worked only for a small group. The review examines that precise assertion, including Trump’s remarks at a March 30 coronavirus task force briefing and in a March 30 Fox & Friends interview. It notes that there was no inherited test for the new coronavirus; in the interview, Trump appeared to misspeak when he referred to an inherited “broken test.” The review distinguishes the CDC’s capacity from the country’s broader capacity to test. It says the CDC’s system alone could not provide pandemic-scale testing, and quotes Anthony Fauci explaining that broad availability required involving private-sector labs. But that limitation did not mean the system was obsolete or broken: Fauci said the CDC had designed a good system for its intended role, and former CDC director Tom Frieden said it had worked in prior emergencies but was not designed to meet the entire U.S. need. The review also describes problems and delays in the federal response. The CDC’s test kits had a manufacturing problem, and the CDC took more than two weeks to provide a fix after revealing it. The FDA allowed labs to create their own tests on Feb. 29, and private diagnostic companies began stepping in about a week later. The review says the administration took steps to allow broader testing more than a month after the public health emergency was declared. Taken together, the evidence supports a narrower point—that the CDC system alone was insufficient for the scale of the pandemic—while challenging Trump’s broader characterization of the inherited system as nonfunctional.