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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

“Jamaica has not recorded any case of the coronavirus.”

Publisher’s rating: Pants on Fire

Research from related reporting contradicts the claim that Jamaica had never recorded a coronavirus case. The Jamaica Observer reports that the country recorded its first COVID-19 case in March 2020 and had more than 156,000 cases before the pandemic was declared over in 2023. The report also describes a more recent local confirmation: Westmoreland medical officer of health Dr Marcia Graham said one case had been confirmed in the parish since the start of that year. She told a meeting of the Westmoreland Municipal Corporation that the patient had been ill in a hospital in the parish. The article notes that Jamaica had stopped tracking cases because COVID-19 was no longer considered a public health emergency, while isolated confirmations continued to be reported. Thus, the lack of routine national tracking does not support the claim that Jamaica had recorded no cases.

PolitiFactHealth & medicine

The COVID-19 vaccines make people "magnetized. They can put a key on their forehead, it sticks. They can put spoons and forks all over them, and they can stick."

Publisher’s rating: False

Related reporting traces the claim to Dr. Sherri Tenpenny’s testimony at the Ohio Statehouse in 2021, where she argued against vaccine requirements and mask mandates. The report quotes her saying that people who received COVID-19 shots were “magnetized” and that a key, spoons and forks could stick to them. This directly matches the claim being checked. The reporting rejects the alleged effect, stating that “The COVID-19 vaccine does not contain microchips or make metal objects stick to recipients.” It describes the claim as misinformation, but the excerpts do not detail experiments or other testing used to reach that conclusion. They therefore support the conclusion that the claim is false, while offering limited information about the underlying verification methods.