THE FACTS: This myth originated from a July 2021 article published by Natural News, a network of more than 400 websites promoting medical and non-medical conspiracy theories. The article referenced a July 27, 2021, announcement from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recommending that people who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 return to wearing masks in indoor public spaces in areas where significant COVID-19 transmission is occurring. CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a press briefing that the change in masking guidelines was due to new evidence indicating that in cases where fully vaccinated individuals become infected with the more contagious delta variant of the COVID-19 virus, they could transmit the virus to others.

Walensky did say that the vaccinated and unvaccinated may have “similarly high” viral loads when infected with the delta variant, suggesting an increased risk of transmission compared to earlier variants of the COVID-19 virus. She did not say that vaccinated individuals have “higher” viral loads or act as “super-spreaders,” as NaturalNews.com claimed. Moreover, she did not say that COVID-19 vaccines were failing, and in fact, said the opposite.

“Getting vaccinated continues to prevent severe illness, hospitalization, and death, even with delta.” she said. “It also helps reduce the spread of the virus in our communities. Vaccinated individuals continue to represent a very small amount of transmission occurring around the country. We continue to estimate that the risk of a breakthrough infection with symptoms upon exposure to the delta variant is reduced by seven-fold. The reduction is 20-fold for hospitalizations and deaths.”

The efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines against the delta variant is supported by peer-reviewed medical studies. A July 2021 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine was 88 percent effective against symptomatic COVID-19 caused by the delta variant. The same study found that the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine was 67 percent effective against symptomatic COVID-19 caused by the delta variant.

MYTH: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that modified DNA is not naturally-occurring and can thus be patented. People who have gotten an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, which modifies the human genome, are now legally patented and have no human rights.

THE FACTS: The 2013 Supreme Court decision in a gene-patenting case did not allow for DNA to be patented. The ruling made synthetic “complementary DNA” patentable, which differs from human DNA. COVID-19 vaccines cannot modify the human genome.

The case originated when Myriad Genetics obtained patents for having isolated the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, mutations of which increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancer. The Association for Molecular Pathology filed suit arguing that Myriad’s patents were invalid because “products of nature” can not be patented. The decision in the case, Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, agreed that DNA could not be patented.

The court did allow for the patentability of a synthetic product called “complementary DNA” (cDNA), created in laboratories for testing purposes. False claims that “people with modified DNA can be patented” are based on this exception.

In fact, “natural DNA is not patentable,” Lara Cartwright-Smith, associate professor in the department of health policy and management at George Washington University, told The Associated Press in a July 2021 article. “The copy that they made is patentable.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stated on its website that “COVID-19 vaccines do not change or interact with your DNA in any way.” mRNA delivers genetic material that instructs cells to manufacture the protein produced by the virus that causes COVID-19 so the immune system learns to fight it. But “the material never enters the nucleus of the cell, which is where our DNA is kept,” the CDC said.

MYTH: Children are three times more likely to die from COVID-19 vaccines than from the disease itself.

THE FACTS: It is baseless to say that COVID-19 vaccines are three times more dangerous for children than the disease itself. As of August 2021, there was no evidence that the COVID-19 vaccine had caused the death of any children in the U.S. or in any of the European countries that had started their vaccination campaigns for children aged 12 and up.

The New England Journal of Medicine published the results of a U.S. clinical trial in July 2021, involving 2,260 adolescents aged 12 to 15 who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which reported no deaths among trial participants and no serious side effects related to the vaccine.

The claim, which seems to have started on the German version of RT, a Russian-owned disinformation website, is based on a misinterpretation of two official German documents: a German government response to an inquiry by the center-right German party FDP in April 2021, reporting 11 deaths out of 385,022 cases of COVID-19 in people under 20 in the country at the time; and a May 2021 report from the Paul Ehrlich Institute, an agency of the German Federal Ministry of Health, which reported that it had received 524 unverified reports of deaths after vaccination, or approximately one in 54,600 vaccinated people at the time.

However, comparing these statistics to conclude that children are three times more likely to die from COVID-19 vaccines than from the disease itself is misleading. Indeed, reports of suspected adverse events to the Paul Ehrlich Institute are not verified, and do not prove a causal relationship between the vaccine and the said event. In a July 2021 email to NewsGuard, Susanne Stöcker, a press officer for the Paul-Ehrlich Institute, added that in most cases, there were plausible explanations to the deaths that had nothing to do with vaccination.

MYTH: The FDA did not grant full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, but instead, approved a separate vaccine called Comirnaty that is not yet available.

THE FACTS: The myth appeared to originate with comments made by Dr. Robert Malone, who was involved in early research that contributed to the development of mRNA vaccines, though the extent of this role has been disputed.

In an Aug. 24, 2021, interview with Steven Bannon, former White House chief strategist under President Donald Trump, Malone said, “Once again, the mainstream media has lied to you…the product that’s licensed is the BioNTech product, which is substantially similar but not necessarily identical. It’s called Comirnaty…and it’s not yet available. They haven’t started manufacturing it or labeling it.”

In fact, on Aug. 23, 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted full approval, also known as licensure, to the COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech for use in people aged 16 and over. The agency also approved the vaccine’s brand name, Comirnaty, as the FDA does not allow drugs or vaccines to be marketed under brand names until they are licensed.

These are not two separate vaccines. Pfizer spokesperson Jerica Pitts told NewsGuard in an August 2021 email that Comimaty and the vaccine that was given emergency use authorization by the FDA in December 2020 “have the same formulation and can be used interchangeably to provide the COVID-19 vaccination series.” FDA spokesperson Allison Hunt also confirmed to NewsGuard in an August 2021 email that Comirnaty “has the same formulation” as the vaccine produced under the emergency use authorization.

At the same time that the FDA granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for people aged 16 and over, it also extended the vaccine’s emergency use authorization covering people between the ages of 12 and 15, as well as for a third dose in certain immunocompromised people.

MYTH: An Oxford University study found that people who have received a COVID-19 vaccine carry 251 times the load of the COVID-19 virus compared to the unvaccinated, turning the vaccinated into superspreaders of the virus.

THE FACTS: This claim relied on misrepresenting a preprint study (meaning that it had not yet been peer-reviewed) from the Oxford University Clinical Research Group. The study compared the viral loads — the amount of virus that can be detected in an infected person — in two groups of people: 62 vaccinated health care workers in Vietnam infected with the COVID-19 delta variant and 30 patients who had been infected with COVID-19 in March and April 2020, before the delta variant emerged and before vaccines were available. The study did not include a comparison group of unvaccinated individuals who were infected with the delta variant.

The study’s three lead authors — Dr. Nguyen Van Vinh Chau, Dr. Guy Thwaites and Dr. Le Van Tan — said in an August 2021 statement that their research had been misrepresented by Children’s Health Defense, the organization of prominent anti-vaccination activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., which promoted the false claim on its site.

“The differences in viral load were driven by the ability of the Delta variant to cause higher viral loads; they had nothing to do with the vaccination status of the infected individual,” the authors said in their statement. “Thus the claim that vaccinated individuals carry 251 times the loads of SARS-CoV-2 in their respiratory tract compared to the unvaccinated people is a misrepresentation of the data.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stated on its website that the viral load of the vaccinated and unvaccinated are similar when they are infected with the delta variant, not “251 times” more for the vaccinated.

“For people infected with the Delta variant, similar amounts of viral genetic material have been found among both unvaccinated and fully vaccinated people,” the CDC said. “However, like prior variants, the amount of viral genetic material may go down faster in fully vaccinated people when compared to unvaccinated people. This means fully vaccinated people will likely spread the virus for less time than unvaccinated people.”

MYTH: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe and “canceled universal vaccination” in its ruling on a lawsuit filed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. against Dr. Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, and the pharmaceutical industry.

THE FACTS: According to a May 2021 article from USA Today and an August 2021 article from fact-checking website LeadStories.com, there has been no recent case before the U.S. Supreme Court involving Kennedy, Fauci, or Gates that involved the COVID-19 vaccine or “universal vaccination.”

According to an April 2021 article from Agence France-Presse, the false claim appeared to originate with a March 29, 2021, post on an Italian Facebook page called Movimento Gilet Arancioni Coordinamento Nazionale. The post falsely claimed that Microsoft co-founder Gates, Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and “Big Pharma lost a U.S. Supreme Court case failing to prove all of their vaccines over the past 32 years were safe for the health of citizens.”

The claim was repeated in a May 23, 2021, article published by Inspirer Radio, a Nigerian website, which attributed the lawsuit to Kennedy and erroneously referred to him as a U.S. Senator. When asked about the claims made in the Inspirer Radio article, Kennedy, an anti-vaccine advocate, told USA Today in May 2021, “That statement is untrue.”

Ikedieze Kanu Okorie, CEO of the company that operates Inspirer Radio, told USA Today in May 2021 that he didn’t have “strong evidence” to support the claims in the article. According to archived versions of the site, the Inspirer Radio article was removed, without being corrected, sometime between May 27 and June 3, 2021.

Regarding the article’s claim that the Supreme Court “canceled universal vaccination,” at the time the Inspirer Radio article was published in May 2021, no U.S. state nor the federal government had issued a universal mandate requiring the general public to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

Editor’s Note: This article was updated on Feb. 1, 2021, to include new information about the COVID-19 vaccines’ effectiveness against virus mutations.