An anonymous X user who operates under the handle @VigilantFox and has 1.9 million followers recently issued the following attention-grabbing post: “DISTURBING: A new peer-reviewed study has quietly uncovered one of the most alarming biological findings of the pandemic era, revealing that 100% of COVID vaccinated participants had amyloid microclots circulating in their blood.”
The post included a video from Australian political commentator and anti-vaccine activist Maria Zee declaring that the study in question was “raising alarms about cumulative vascular injuries across the entire globe” from Covid-19 vaccines.
Sounds scary, except that the research they cited did not even study Covid vaccines.
I’m the health editor for NewsGuard, a journalist-run service that publishes reliability ratings of news and information websites and maintains a database of false claims circulating online. As responsible journalists are taught to do, my reporter colleagues contacted the study’s authors for comment before trying to interpret their academic research.
The X post and Zee referenced an Oct. 2 study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Virology. The study’s stated aim was to assess a possible connection between abnormal clumps of blood clotting proteins, or “microclots,” and long Covid — not vaccines. A day after @VigilantFox issued the post, study co-authors Resia Pretorius and Alain Thierry told NewsGuard in an email: “Vaccination was not a variable under study, nor...
Earlier today, the New York Department of Consumer and Worker Protection issued a report claiming DoorDash is tricking consumers to reduce tips. The report gets a lot wrong. Here are the facts. My...