SciCheck Digest

The COVID-19 death rate for unvaccinated people has been significantly higher than for vaccinated people in both Israel and the U.S. Despite that, conservative commentator Ben Swann makes the false claim in a video that Israeli data prove vaccines aren’t effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths. But the charts he uses don’t distinguish between vaccinated and unvaccinated patients.

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As COVID-19 vaccines became more widely available in the U.S. after they were introduced in December 2020, daily deaths from the disease fell from a high of 4,094 on Jan. 13 to a low of 120 on July 11, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The number of daily deaths then started rising again as the delta variant became dominant in July, reaching a high of 2,398 on Sept. 24.

Unvaccinated individuals died at a much higher rate; they had an 11 times greater risk of dying from COVID-19 in August than fully vaccinated people, according to data compiled by the CDC.

“This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in July.

But Ben Swann — who has peddled dubious claims and conspiracy theories, including the falsehood that COVID-19 vaccines may include a tracking device in a microchip — recently posted a video claiming that the vaccines have been ineffective.

“The reality is, is that the numbers for COVID deaths, the numbers for COVID hospitalizations, the number of sick people, the transmission rate — none of it has changed as a result of these vaccines,” he said. “The only thing that’s changed is the bottom line for big pharma.”

To support his claim, Swann cited data from Israel — which had a successful vaccination program early on, vaccinating more than half its population by April. Almost 62% of the country’s total population is currently fully vaccinated. In the U.S., about 58% of the total population is fully vaccinated.

“So if you take a look at what’s been happening there,” Swann said in the video, referring to Israel, “you can get kind of a stronger idea of what is working and not working with the COVID-19 vaccines. And one of the things that we’re now finding is that the lie that’s been told for some time, that COVID-19 vaccines will prevent you from getting a serious case or even hospitalizations or deaths – actually, it’s not true. Statistically, the numbers are pretty much the same as they were before the vaccine was even introduced.”

He then shows a series of charts purporting to show “Deaths Per Hospitalisation,” “COVID Test Positivity Rate,” and “Hospitalisations/Positive Test Rate.” The charts all show an uptick at the end. But there are a few problems with how he presents the data.

• First, Swann’s charts are from a Sept. 22 blog post when the delta surge was peaking. But when Swann’s video went up more than a month later on Oct. 27, COVID-19 daily rates of deaths, hospitalizations and cases in the U.S. and Israel had fallen significantly.
• Second, neither the original post nor Swann’s video mentions the delta variant, which is more contagious than earlier versions of the virus that causes COVID-19 and led to the spike in cases that began over the summer, when attitudes toward mitigation measures like social distancing and mask wearing had relaxed.
• And third — and most important — the charts don’t distinguish between deaths among vaccinated versus unvaccinated patients. In Israel, as in the U.S., the rates of those who have died or been severely ill from COVID-19 since the delta surge began have been higher among the unvaccinated compared with the vaccinated, according to data from the Israel Ministry of Health.

So Swann’s support for his claim doesn’t hold up.

As we said, the delta surge peaked in September. For example, the number of COVID-19 deaths during the delta surge peaked at 37 on Sept. 6, but had dropped to six on the day Swann released his video, according to data from the Israel Ministry of Health. As of Nov. 8, the number of daily deaths in Israel had fallen to three.

A chart from Our World in Data, a project run by the British nonprofit Global Change Data Lab and the ​Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development​ at the University of Oxford, shows that death rates per 1 million population from COVID-19 decreased as vaccination rates increased, until the delta variant became prevalent in July.

But again, as we said, it’s important to note that the death rate for those who were unvaccinated or partially vaccinated was higher than it was for those who were fully vaccinated in both the U.S. and Israel during the delta surge. For example, on Sept. 6, the day Israel’s delta surge peaked, Ministry of Health data show that patients over the age of 60 died at a rate of 13.6 per 100,000 people if they were unvaccinated, 10.8 if they were partially vaccinated, and 0.1 if they were fully vaccinated. For those under 60, the rates were 0.1 for unvaccinated patients and zero for partially and fully vaccinated patients.

In the U.S., the CDC’s data on vaccination status and death aren’t available for the full month of September, but they show that through August, unvaccinated people had a risk of dying that was 11.3 times greater than fully vaccinated people. (See the CDC chart at right).

As we’ve explained before, the raw numbers of hospitalizations and deaths aren’t good indicators of whether vaccines are effective.

“Epidemiologists never look at raw number of cases if we want to think about anything causal, because they don’t tell us what we want to know. We need to know the denominator too,” Matthew Fox, professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Global Health at Boston University, told us for a story we published last week on social media posts misinterpreting data from the U.K. Fox said the death rates for vaccinated and unvaccinated people are the better measure, though there are other factors in those populations that can affect the statistics.

It’s also worth repeating what we’ve explained before — all of the COVID-19 vaccines available in the U.S. are highly effective at preventing symptomatic disease. Clinical trials for all three vaccines showed that they were effective, and studies since then have demonstrated that they are effective in real-world conditions. They’ve also been shown to be effective against the delta variant, although they are less effective in preventing infection and mild disease compared with earlier versions of the virus.

Most studies show the vaccines remain highly effective in preventing serious disease, hospitalization and death from delta, and ongoing monitoring by the CDC shows that the vaccines are more than 80% effective in preventing hospitalization.

Editor’s note: SciCheck’s COVID-19/Vaccination Project is made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation. The goal of the project is to increase exposure to accurate information about COVID-19 and vaccines, while decreasing the impact of misinformation.

Sources

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Trends in Number of COVID-19 Cases and Deaths in the US Reported to CDC, by State/Territory. Accessed 3 Nov 2021.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Rates of COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by Vaccination Status. Accessed 2 Nov 2021.

Walensky, Rochelle. Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Press Briefing by White House COVID-⁠19 Response Team and Public Health Officials. Whitehouse.gov. 16 Jul 2021.

Hale Spencer, Saranac. “Video Misrepresents the Science Behind Face Masks.” FactCheck.org. 24 Jul 2021.

Hale Spencer, Saranac, Jessica McDonald and Angelo Fichera. “New ‘Plandemic’ Video Peddles Misinformation, Conspiracies.” FactCheck.org. Updated 29 Jun 2021.

Hale Spencer, Saranac. “Health Sensors Misconstrued as Government Tracking ‘Microchips.’” FactCheck.org. 27 Aug 2021.

Leshem, Eyal and Annelies Wilder-Smith. “COVID-19 vaccine impact in Israel and a way out of the pandemic.” The Lancet. 5 May 2021.

Our World in Data. “Share of the population fully vaccinated against COVID-19.” Accessed 4 Nov 2021.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “COVID-19 Vaccinations in the United States.” Accessed 4 Nov 2021.

“Vaccines Failing Against Serious Disease, Data From Israel Suggests.” Dailysceptic.org. 22 Sep 2021.

Our World in Data. “Daily new confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people.” Accessed 4 Nov 2021.

Our World in Data. “Number of COVID-19 patients in hospital per million people.” Accessed 4 Nov 2021.

Our World in Data. “Daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases per million people.” Accessed 4 Nov 2021.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Delta Variant: What We Know About the Science.” Updated 26 Aug 2021.

Joseph, Andrew. “How the Delta variant’s remarkable ability to replicate threw new twists into the Covid-19 pandemic.” Stat. 9 Sep 2021.

Israel Ministry of Health. Died daily – immunization status. Accessed 4 Nov 2021.

Israel Ministry of Health. Severely ill – immunization. Accessed 4 Nov 2021.

Robertson, Lori. “Why It’s Easy to Misinterpret Numbers of Deaths Among the Vaccinated.” FactCheck.org. 1 Nov 2021.

FactCheck.org. How effective are the vaccines? Updated 26 Aug 2021.

An image of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in what looks like the Pope’s outfit, complete with the headgear worn by the head of Vatican on special occasions is getting shared a lot across social media platforms in multiple languages. The image shows the Prime Minister amidst many people and holding a cross in his hand. 

Here are some post with this image on Facebook:

Fact Crescendo received multiple requests to verify the authenticity of the image on its 24×7 WhatsApp Factline number 904 905 3770 over the last few hours. Archived Link

Our investigation showed that the image is morphed. 

Fact Check Methodology

At first we ran a reverse image search on Google with the viral photograph of the Indian Prime Minister. We got multiple links with the same photograph but the person is not PM Modi. We went through the links and saw that the person is actually Pope Francis of the Vatican. 

Here is the link to a news report published on December 25, 2019 on News 18 website where the original image has been used:

News 18 link

In the news report, we can see that the caption states it is an image from the Christmas Eve mass in 2019 at St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican and photo credit has been given to Reuters. 

The same image was also published on November 20, 2020 in a news report on BBC’s website headlined “Uighurs: China rebuffs Pope’s criticism as ‘groundless’.” 

BBC Link

Following this, we searched online with relevant keywords to check if PM Modi has ever been photographed wearing a costume like the one in the viral image but failed to find anything. 

Here is a comparison of the Viral Image and the image we saw in the above news reports:

We can spot the similarities in both the images, including the person standing behind and the way the cross is being held and it is only the face on the person in focus that it different. 

Conclusion

From the above evidences, it is clear that the person is the image is Pope Francis of the Vatican and not Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. The image has been altered and PM Modi’s face has been morphed into the picture in place of the Pope’s face and is being shared to mislead anyone who receives it. 

Title:Morphed image of PM Modi in Pope’s costume and holding a cross goes viral on messaging platforms

Fact Check By: Manjori Borkotoky 

Result: Altered