Mass rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines has been the defining story of 2021, yet for all its success, vaccination rates remain stubbornly low in some populations.
As with all things in American life these days, partisanship has played an outsized roll: an estimated four in 10 Republicans, for example, remain unvaccinated, according to a November Kaiser Family Foundation survey. With more than 400 million doses administered to date, the vaccines have proven to be very safe and effective — especially at preventing hospitalization and death — yet misinformation continues to drive vaccine hesitancy among many Americans.
At FactCheck.org, we spent much of our efforts in 2021 addressing vaccine misinformation, and so as we consider our whoppers of the year, those stories come to the forefront of the discussion.
Another prominent line of misinformation is a carry-over from 2020, former President Donald Trump’s continued instance that massive voter fraud caused him to lose the 2020 election. The president’s false claims came to a head in a fact-challenged Jan. 6 speech in Washington, D.C. that preceded a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol while Congress was meeting to certify then-President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
Despite fact-checkers’ best efforts to meticulously debunk many of the former president’s baseless election claims, the idea has gained traction among a majority of Republicans and has been used to justify new election laws in many GOP-led states.
And, of...
From False Claims Act exposure and Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS—a supplement to the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR)),compliance to export controls and human rights...