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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

Grant Wahl died because of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Publisher’s rating: False

Related reporting addresses the claim through Dr. Céline Gounder’s account of the autopsy findings after her husband, journalist Grant Wahl, died. It says that people blamed a COVID-19 vaccine within days of his death, and reports that the autopsy specifically assessed that possibility. The account states that Wahl tested negative for COVID-19 and that the report concluded his prior vaccination “neither caused nor contributed” to the rupture that killed him. That finding directly contradicts the claim that the vaccine caused his death. The excerpt describes the cause of death as a rupture associated with an aortic aneurysm: it contrasts Wahl’s aorta, which “bulged and burst,” with a different kind of aortic injury discussed in the article. It does not provide the autopsy report itself, its full medical findings, or independent analysis of the report, so this summary relies on the article’s account of those findings rather than a direct review of the underlying document.

PolitiFactHealth & medicine

Says Herman Cain died of cancer, not COVID-19.

Publisher’s rating: False

Related reporting directly contradicts the claim that Herman Cain died of cancer rather than COVID-19. It identifies Cain as a former presidential candidate and says he died on July 30, 2020, aged 74, after being hospitalized with COVID-19 beginning June 29. This speaks to the specific person and death in the claim, not merely to COVID-19 deaths in general. [S3] The same account places Cain at President Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 20, 2020, and notes that he shared a photograph of attendees without masks. That event detail provides chronology in the reporting, while the stated cause-related evidence is his COVID-19 hospitalization and the account’s placement of his death in a gallery of people who died from coronavirus. [S3]