copenlu/druid huggingface dataset:
Claim: New York state “hospitals reporting thousands of fungus lung infections due to wearing a mask!!” (Facebook posts, 2020-07-30)
Evidence (2023-03-20): The new findings may also reflect the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, eight states reported their first cases of C. auris, more than in any other year. CDC scientists believe that crowded conditions in hospitals—particularly those facing shortages of staff, equipment, and PPE—contributed to the spread of the fungus. Infections are rare but serious—mortality rates are about 30%—and symptoms can include fever and chills, followed by organ failure.
Claim: New York state “hospitals reporting thousands of fungus lung infections due to wearing a mask!!” (Facebook posts, 2020-07-30)
Evidence (2022-11-16): Studies from the 1950s and 60s indicated that fungal lung infections were a problem only in certain parts of the country. The new study, available online in Clinical Infectious Diseases, shows that is no longer the case. Doctors who rely on outdated maps of disease-causing fungi may miss the signs of a fungal lung infection, resulting in delayed or incorrect diagnoses, the researchers said. [...] People develop fungal lung infections after breathing in spores from fungi in the soil. The spores become airborne when the ground is disturbed by farming, landscaping, construction or even just by people walking around in fungi-rich environments such as caves. Most healthy adults and children can fight off a fungal infection handily, but infants, older adults and people with compromised immune systems may develop fever, cough, fatigue and other symptoms. Fungal lung infections easily can be mistaken for bacterial or viral lung infections such as COVID-19, bacterial pneumonia and tuberculosis. [...] The researchers calculated the number of fungal lung infections nationwide from 2007 to 2016 using Medicare fee-for-service claims from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Using the patients’ home addresses to identify counties of residence, they calculated the number of cases per 100,000 person-years for each county. (Person-years are a way to correct for the fact that counties can have wildly different population sizes; one person on Medicare for one year is one person-year). Counties with more than 100 cases caused by Histoplasma or Coccidioides, or 50 cases caused by Blastomyces, per 100,000 person-years were defined as having a meaningful number of fungal lung infections.
Claim: New York state “hospitals reporting thousands of fungus lung infections due to wearing a mask!!” (Facebook posts, 2020-07-30)
Evidence (2020-06-30): No, New York state hospitals didn’t report thousands of lung infections caused by face masks [...] - There’s no evidence wearing a face mask properly causes fungal lung infections. [...] There is a similar dearth of evidence to corroborate the claim that hospitals in New York have reported thousands of fungus lung infections caused by face masks, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does recommend washing cloth face coverings after each use.
Claim: New York state “hospitals reporting thousands of fungus lung infections due to wearing a mask!!” (Facebook posts, 2020-07-30)
Evidence (2020-07-09): You can’t make this up: New York state hospitals reporting thousands of fungus lung infections due to wearing a mask. [...] For one, the fact-checking site PolitiFact spoke with health officials in New York who say hospitals did not report thousands of lung infections. [...] Dora Anne Mills, the chief health improvement officer for Maine Health and former CDC director, says regular wearing of masks or fabric facial coverings does not cause fungal infections.
Claim: New York state “hospitals reporting thousands of fungus lung infections due to wearing a mask!!” (Facebook posts, 2020-07-30)
Evidence (2023-02-07): 4 key things to know about lung infections caused by fungi [...] Wearing a mask can also help limit exposure. "Especially if you’re immunosuppressed, wear a mask."
Claim: New York state “hospitals reporting thousands of fungus lung infections due to wearing a mask!!” (Facebook posts, 2020-07-30)
Evidence (2020-07-02): Is Mask Wearing Causing Fungal Lung Infections? No, This Is Another Bogus Claim On Facebook [...] "People are starting to enter ERs with fungal lung infections from wearing masks!! Take breaks from your masks." [...] This claim about mask-wearing leading to fungal lung infections is bogus.
Claim: New York state “hospitals reporting thousands of fungus lung infections due to wearing a mask!!” (Facebook posts, 2020-07-30)
Evidence (2023-06-06): Increased Hospitalizations Involving Fungal Infections during COVID-19 Pandemic, United States, January 2020–December 2021 Hospitalizations involving fungal infections increased 8.5% each year in the United States during 2019–2021. During 2020–2021, patients hospitalized with COVID-19–associated fungal infections had higher (48.5%) in-hospital mortality rates than those with non–COVID-19–associated fungal infections (12.3%). Improved fungal disease surveillance is needed, particularly during respiratory virus pandemics. [...] During 2019–2021, a total of 59,212 fungal hospitalizations were identified in the PHD-SR. Rates of fungal hospitalizations (per 10,000 hospitalizations) increased from 22.3 in 2019 to 25.0 in 2020 and 26.8 in 2021 (p<0.01), representing an average annual percentage change of 8.5% (Table 1). Average annual rates of hospitalization significantly increased for each fungal infection, except for those caused by Pneumocystis spp., Cryptococcus spp., and other specified fungi (Table 1).
Claim: New York state “hospitals reporting thousands of fungus lung infections due to wearing a mask!!” (Facebook posts, 2020-07-30)
Evidence (2021-09-24): A Facebook user shared an image on Sept. 16 with the text, "You can't make this up: NYS hospitals reporting thousands of fungus lung infections due to wearing a mask." [...] New York hospitals have not reported thousands of fungal lung infections from wearing masks, according to Dr. Bruce Farber, chief of public health and epidemiology at Northwell Health, the largest health care provider in New York. [...] Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim New York hospitals reported thousands of fungal lung infections due to wearing masks. No such reports were made, according to health officials in New York. Wearing a mask does not cause fungal lung infection.
Claim: New York state “hospitals reporting thousands of fungus lung infections due to wearing a mask!!” (Facebook posts, 2020-07-30)
Evidence (2022-08-02): The environmental exposure to Mucorales45, but also Aspergillus spp., combined with susceptible hosts owing to uncontrolled underlying diseases such as diabetes (major risk factor for CAM16) further worsened by overuse of antibiotics in the absence of stewardship programmes (major risk factor for CAC) and particularly overuse of dexamethasone predisposes for opportunistic fungal infections in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs; Fig. 3 and Supplementary Table 2). AIDS and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are also more frequently observed in LMICs161, where they may predispose patients to COVID-19-associated IFIs. Prolonged wearing of masks has also been described as a risk factor for CAM in LMICs (Fig. 3 and Supplementary Table 2). Overall, implementation of infection control measures during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is further complicated due to limited resources. This is particularly problematic for C. auris as a nosocomial pathogen with intrahospital transmissions. While CAM and CAC have a high predominance in LMICs, CAPA is rarely reported, probably due to a diagnostic bias resulting from unobtainable indirect/molecular testing reluctance and inadequate resources to perform bronchoscopies and limited ICU capacities. In the rare cases where CAPA manifests as cerebral infections, it is more likely to be diagnosed in LMICs.
Claim: New York state “hospitals reporting thousands of fungus lung infections due to wearing a mask!!” (Facebook posts, 2020-07-30)
Evidence (2020-04-23): Is It Time to Wear a Mask Again? [...] Wearing Masks Will Help Keep Economies Open: Johns Hopkins [Video] [...] There are two types of masks used in preventing infections: surgical masks and respirator masks. It’s important to know the difference, and which situations they’re useful in.
Claim: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” (Donald Trump, 2021-01-05)
Evidence (2021-01-05): The role of the vice president, as president of the Senate, is to open envelopes with results from each state and announce the final tally. Neither the 12th Amendment nor the Electoral Control Act give the vice president any role beyond those two steps.
Claim: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” (Donald Trump, 2021-01-05)
Evidence (2023-08-03): According to the indictment, "As the January 6 congressional certification proceeding approached and other efforts to impair, obstruct, and defeat the federal government function failed, the Defendant [Trump] sought to enlist the Vice President to use his ceremonial role at the certification to fraudulently alter the election results. The Defendant did this first by using knowingly false claims of election fraud to convince the Vice President to accept the Defendant’s fraudulent electors, reject legitimate electoral votes, or send legitimate electoral votes to state legislatures for review rather than count them. When that failed, the Defendant attempted to use a crowd of supporters that he had gathered in Washington, D.C., to pressure the Vice President to fraudulently alter the election results." [...] That same day, Trump posted to social media, "The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors." Trump met alone that day with Pence. According to the indictment, "When the Vice President refused to agree to the Defendant’s request that he obstruct the certification, the Defendant grew frustrated and told the Vice President that the Defendant would have to publicly criticize him."
Claim: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” (Donald Trump, 2021-01-05)
Evidence (2021-01-05): "The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors," Trump declared falsely, lending credence to an erroneous theory that Pence can overturn the results of the election during Wednesday’s tally of Electoral College votes and again pressuring his top lieutenant to act outside constitutional bounds. [...] Pence and White House aides have tried to explain to the President that Pence’s role is more of a formality and he cannot unilaterally reject the Electoral College votes. Pence has walked Trump through his largely procedural role in hopes of downplaying the pressure on him, a strategy that doesn’t appear to have worked given the President explicitly urged him to take action Monday night without saying exactly what he wanted Pence to do. [...] On Sunday, Pence met for a lengthy session with the Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough in his office just off the Senate floor. Pence chief of staff Marc Short, who was also in the Capitol and seen at one point going into the office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, denied the purpose of the meeting was to find a way to overturn the Electoral College results.
Claim: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” (Donald Trump, 2021-01-05)
Evidence (2021-01-05): Mr Trump appears to be labouring under the impression that his Vice President has real power over the result tomorrow, and is able to unilaterally decide whether or not to accept a state’s electoral college votes. [...] "The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors," Mr Trump added in a tweet this morning. Put aside the fact that there is no evidence any state’s electors were chosen fraudulently. On a more fundamental level, Mr Pence simply does not have that power.
Claim: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” (Donald Trump, 2021-01-05)
Evidence (2022-06-17): The day before the assault on the Capitol, Trump tweeted, "The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors." PolitiFact rated that False. [...] The other guiding law is the 1887 Electoral Count Act. It provides more procedural details, but gives the vice president no power to reject votes. As recently as January 2022, Trump argued the opposite, saying that Pence "could have overturned the election." [...] If evidence of fraud on a scale big enough to flip the results had emerged — as Trump alleged — then there might have been legal grounds for Congress to reject electoral slates. But every state certified their election results, meaning that officials — a mix of Republicans and Democrats — were confident that there was no fraud or errors to come close to reversing the results. And in dozens of lawsuits after the election, judge after judge consistently rejected such allegations.
Claim: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” (Donald Trump, 2021-01-05)
Evidence (2023-07-27): The plan, which would come to be known as the "fake elector" scheme, failed, as Vice President Mike Pence refused to consider Trump’s slates of electoral certificates on the riot-punctuated day of Jan. 6, 2021. [...] Trump pressured Pence to "reject fraudulently chosen electors" and to "do the right thing" and "send it back to the states to recertify." But Pence rejected that plan. [...] Clarifying and limiting the role of the vice president. The provisions in the 2022 spending law says the vice president’s role is strictly "ministerial" — that is, ceremonial. The vice president "shall have no power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes over the proper list of electors," the law says.
Claim: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” (Donald Trump, 2021-01-05)
Evidence (2021-01-06): "We intend to vote on January 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not 'regularly given' and 'lawfully certified' (the statutory requisite), unless and until that emergency 10-day audit is completed," the group said in a statement. [...] Beyond the charges that Republicans will be raising, President Trump is also arguing that Vice President Pence can make his own decisions about the electors. On Tuesday, he tweeted that the "vice president has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors." He made the claim after telling supporters at a Georgia rally Monday that he hopes Pence "comes through for us" on the Electoral College tally. But the vice president does not have the power to reject any state's electors. The vice president only has the power to "preserve order" in the joint session and preside over it as the president of the Senate. The results will be delivered to the vice president, who is the president of the Senate, but he does not have the power to reject electors or change the outcome of the Electoral College count.
Claim: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” (Donald Trump, 2021-01-05)
Evidence (2021-01-05): President Donald Trump claimed Tuesday that Vice President Mike Pence could single-handedly reject certain electors during Congress' Electoral College certification process, turning up the pressure on him to help overturn the results of the election. [...] Trump has also rallied Republican members to object to the certification in Congress even though the effort is certainly doomed to fail — both chambers must agree to toss out a state's slate of electors, and Democrats control the House. Potter said that if Pence did try to disregard the law and intervene, he'd have to argue that the Electoral College Act was unconstitutional in some way.
Claim: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” (Donald Trump, 2021-01-05)
Evidence (2021-01-05): Trump pressures Pence to throw out election results — even though he can’t "The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors," Trump tweeted Tuesday. [...] "The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors," Trump tweeted Tuesday. [...] Some of Trump’s boosters have also fixated on Pence’s role, arguing that he has the unilateral authority to not accept the results — and open the door for alternative slates of Trump electors instead. Rep. Louie Goehmert (R-Texas) sued Pence in a failed bid to empower the vice president to overturn the election results. That lawsuit has twice been rejected by federal courts in the past week.
Claim: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” (Donald Trump, 2021-01-05)
Evidence (2021-01-05): President Donald Trump tweeted this morning, "The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors." Last night Trump said at a political rally in Georgia, "I hope Mike Pence comes through for us.… If he doesn't come through, I won't like him quite as much." This is what passes for legal reasoning in the Trump White House on the day before Pence presides over the electoral count in the Senate. As I explained last week ("No, Jefferson didn’t rig the 1800 vote count"), the misguided notion that Pence enjoys any latitude to pick and choose electoral ballots derives in large part from a misreading of a 2004 law review article ("Thomas Jefferson Counts Himself into the Presidency") by David Fontana of George Washington University and Bruce Ackerman of Yale. In their article, Fontana and Ackerman raise the possibility that in 1800 Jefferson, who was then both vice president and a candidate for president, tilted the electoral count in his own favor by not throwing out Georgia’s electoral ballot, even though three congressional "tellers" charged with reviewing the ballots (two from the House and one from the Senate) had noted an irregularity in the format of that ballot. [...] Precedents established by Thomas Jefferson in 1800 would permit Pence to invalidate a particular state’s electoral returns on the grounds that the underlying vote-count was generated in an illegitimate fashion — that it was rigged.
Claim: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” (Donald Trump, 2021-01-05)
Evidence (2020-12-29): Pence could refuse to recognize the clerks handing him the actual electoral counts. He could pull out those false Republican electoral votes and say he thought they were legitimate. [...] Here’s Trump in a tweet Tuesday, inaccurately claiming Pence has the authority to choose or not choose electors. (That’s Congress’s job, as we explained above.) [...] Last week, Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Tex.) sued in federal court to get rid of the Electoral Count Act and make Pence legally able to choose whatever sets of electors he wants. A federal judge in Texas, a Trump appointee, threw it out immediately.
Claim: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” (Donald Trump, 2021-01-05)
Evidence (2021-01-06): By — Associated Press Associated Press By — Aaron Glantz, The Center for Investigative Reporting Aaron Glantz, The Center for Investigative Reporting Leave a comment 0comments Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-pences-full-letter-saying-he-cant-claim-unilateral-authority-to-reject-electoral-votes Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Read Pence’s full letter saying he can’t claim ‘unilateral authority’ to reject electoral votes Politics Jan 6, 2021 1:43 PM EDT WASHINGTON (AP) — Defying President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday that he does not have the power to discard electoral votes that will make Democrat Joe Biden the next president on Jan. 20. Pence said in a statement issued minutes before he was to begin presiding over a joint session of Congress to count those votes that it was "my considered judgement that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not." In the days before the joint session, Trump has pressured his vice president to toss electors from battleground states that voted for Biden to overturn the will of voters in a desperate and futile bid to undo President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the November election.
Claim: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” (Donald Trump, 2021-01-05)
Evidence (2021-01-05): In a tweet Tuesday, the president was even blunter, incorrectly claiming, "The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors." [...] "The only responsibility and power of the Vice President under the Constitution is to faithfully count the electoral college votes as they have been cast," Luttig wrote. "The Constitution does not empower the Vice President to alter in any way the votes that have been cast, either by rejecting certain of them or otherwise." [...] During their weekly lunch Tuesday, Pence explicitly told Trump that he does not believe he has the authority to block the congressional certification of Biden’s electoral victory, according to a White House official. But Trump issued a statement later Tuesday denying the conversation, which was first reported by the New York Times, claiming "the Vice President and I are in total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act."
Claim: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” (Donald Trump, 2021-01-05)
Evidence (2021-10-06): "The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors," Trump declared falsely on Tuesday, magnifying on Twitter the wholly incorrect belief that Pence can wield his gavel at will to overturn the results of the election. [...] The vice president "shares the concerns of millions of Americans about voter fraud and irregularities in the last election," his office said in a statement last week, and "welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American people on January 6th." [...] In recent weeks, Trump has become keenly interested in the presiding officer's role but still does not understand it. Last month, he signaled his approval when GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas filed a quickly dismissed lawsuit designed to get Pence to overturn the election results. Aboard Air Force One on his way to Florida for Christmas, he retweeted a supporter's entreaty for Pence to refuse to accept the Electoral College results.
Claim: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” (Donald Trump, 2021-01-05)
Evidence (2021-01-06): Politico | Donald Trump pressures Mike Pence to throw out US election results – even though he can’t - ‘The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors,’ Trump tweets - Pence is expected to preside over a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, when lawmakers will count Electoral College votes affirming Joe Biden’s win [...] US President Donald Trump pressured Vice-President Mike Pence publicly on Tuesday to reject the results of the Electoral College when they come before Congress on Wednesday, part of Trump’s doomed-to-fail, last-ditch effort to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. "The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors," Trump tweeted on Tuesday.