Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.

Input: Consider Input: Paragraph: As criticism spread against United States President Donald Trump’s administration for its response to the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March 2020, one graphic disseminated on social media listed his multiple attempts to downplay the disease:In this case, the graphic is completely accurate. The various statements are correctly attributed to Trump, and each has been verified in independent timelines compiled by news outlets.“We’re ordering a lot of supplies. We’re ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn’t be ordering unless it was something like this. But we’re ordering a lot of different elements of medical.” — Trump on the coronavirus pic.twitter.com/id6YLzbmRE— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 28, 2020A video with similar content, posted by writer Lindsay Holst and featuring audio of several of Trump’s remarks alongside a graph showing the spread of the disease, has been shared thousands of times on Twitter:57 days later. pic.twitter.com/umsfZHyBuo— Lindsay Holst (@LindsayLHolst) March 17, 2020On March 17 2020, journalists asked Trump why his tone had shifted so quickly and dramatically regarding the epidemic. He told reporters, “I’ve always known this is a real — this is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic. I’ve always viewed it as very serious.” Claim: United States President Donald Trump made several statements downplaying the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Output: ‘Timeline of Trump’s COVID-19 Statements’ Meme


Input: Consider Input: Paragraph: "Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump and his allies, challenged the president’s top health official recently on the administration’s handling of the 2019 coronavirus outbreak. Dobbs criticized Health and Human Secretary Alex Azar over a lack of transparency in the agency’s handling of COVID-19, which has infected nearly 91,000 people globally across 73 countries and led to more than nine American deaths. ""There’s a better ratio of testing for the coronavirus in other countries than we maintain here,"" Dobbs said during the March 2 interview on his TV show. ""We’re actually screening fewer people because we don’t have appropriate testing."" Azar countered that the Trump administration has taken recent steps to roll back regulations and increase the availability of diagnostic test kits to ""hundreds and thousands and millions."" The United States is set to significantly expand its testing capabilities in the coming days and weeks, but Dobbs is correct that the country has lagged behind other nations so far. ""It is true that diagnostic capacity in the U.S. has been lower than in some other countries, but that is changing,"" said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. It’s hard to pinpoint how many people have been tested for the coronavirus, both in the U.S. and around the world. The World Health Organization doesn’t track the number of tests administered in each country, and the numbers that are available are constantly updating. In a statement to PolitiFact, a Fox News spokesperson representing Dobbs cited data from the WorldOMeter, a real-time tool that ""shows estimated current numbers based on statistics and projections from the most reputable official organizations,"" according to its website. Using estimates derived from official government sources, the WorldOMeter says at least eight countries — South Korea, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Finland, Vietnam and Turkey — have given more tests relative to the size of their populations than the United States. That lines up with experts’ analyses and with what multiple news outlets have reported. Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said South Korea ""has screened at least thousands, and Guangdong, China, has screened at least hundreds of thousands,"" citing a WHO report on the outbreak in China, where the virus was first detected. South Korea ramped up testing by building drive-thru screening clinics for speedy assessments, according to local reports. Other countries, like Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Italy have also conducted thousands of diagnostic tests. ""We have done nothing like what other countries have done,"" Lipsitch said, noting that the U.S. had, until recently, limited not only the number of labs that were allowed to conduct tests on suspected cases, but also the number of patients that were eligible to be screened. It’s difficult to say just how far behind the U.S. has fallen, due to the murkiness around the number of administered tests. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped releasing a public count of tests on March 2. The administration’s public statements haven’t cleared it up. On Feb. 29, the CDC reported testing 472 Americans. A day later, Azar told ABC News the U.S. had tested over 3,600 people. And a spokesperson for HHS, Azar’s agency, told us on March 3 that the CDC had tested samples from more than 1,200 patients. ""I don't know how to track U.S. tests any more,"" Lipsitch said. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar speaks at the White House about the coronavirus on Feb. 28, 2020, in Washington. (AP/Vucci) The CDC stopped posting testing data as more state and local public-health labs have been brought into the fold, said Nancy Messonnier, a top CDC official, said during a March 3 briefing. ""With more and more testing done at states, these numbers would not be representative of the testing being done nationally,"" she said. An HHS spokesperson told us that the department doesn’t know how many additional tests have been administered by those state and local labs, adding that those labs can now test up to 15,000 people and are expected to be able to test as many as 75,000 people by March 6. The U.S. test count should rise into the millions as IDT, a commercial manufacturer, and other commercial and academic labs begin producing their own tests soon, according to HHS. The government’s initial testing effort was hindered by flaws with the CDC’s early test kits and restrictions that had limited which labs could run the tests and which patients could be tested. When the first U.S. coronavirus was detected, the country brushed aside the WHO test used by other nations and leaned on the CDC to develop and mass produce a more complicated test capable of detecting other viruses in addition to the coronavirus, according to reports. The test kits went out in early February. But some state labs that received them reported that flaws in the tests were triggering inconclusive results. Those states had to ship samples out to the CDC’s offices in Atlanta for results until the CDC fixed the problem weeks later. Since then, the Food and Drug Administration has given labs and hospitals across the country the go-ahead to administer their own tests before the FDA finishes reviewing them, so long as those tests are proven to work. That should lead to more testing, experts said. The CDC also modified its screening criteria to expand testing for some people with severe respiratory symptoms who did not travel to China or come into known contact with a coronavirus patient. Previously, travel to China or exposure to the virus were preconditions for screening. Adequate testing is essential to getting an accurate count of U.S. cases, experts said. Testing is also key for treating patients and identifying people who might be infected but don’t show symptoms, said Richard Watanabe, professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California. ""The latest data suggests the incubation period for COVID-19 can be as long as a couple of weeks,"" Watanabe said. Despite the recent acceleration, Lipsitch said U.S. testing is happening ""very slowly and at a level that is still paltry"" compared with some other countries. Dobbs said that the United States is ""actually screening fewer people (for the coronavirus than other countries) because we don’t have appropriate testing."" Experts told us that to date, the United States has lagged behind other countries, though numbers are imprecise. An error with the CDC’s early test kits contributed to the United States’ relatively low screening numbers. The administration has taken steps to make testing more widely available. With that additional information." Claim: The United States is “actually screening fewer people (for the coronavirus than other countries) because we don't have appropriate testing.

Output: The CDC has stopped publicly reporting the number of tests it’s administered. So far, the United States has lagged behind other nations in terms of coronavirus testing. It has recently taken steps to ramp up its testing capabilities. Until recently, the U.S. had insisted that only the CDC’s test could be used — despite flaws in some early kits — and that only certain patients could get tested.


Input: Consider Input: Paragraph: The story didn’t mention cost. The nicotine patch is readily available over the counter. We found a range of prices online, including one big chain’s patch for roughly $2.70 a day. Quantifying changes in cognitive function for readers is a challenge. Exactly what does a long term memory performance of 46% of normal mean? Are these changes important for daily living or are they statistically significant but clinically irrelevant? The story included that important caveat from the researchers:  “whether these effects are clinically important will require larger studies.” The story reported:  “The study found no problematic side effects associated with the nicotine patch and none of the patients had withdrawal symptoms when it was stopped. However, patients on nicotine did lose a few pounds, which is a known side effect.” The study also reported a small drop in systolic blood pressure in subjected treated with nicotine – an unusual finding which the story did not report. We like that the story, unlike the MSNBC piece, noted that “nicotine might enhance the cancer-causing properties of other substances.” The study design, number of subjects and other information is provided. Both this story and the one by MSNBC used information that we could not find in the journal article, but which did appear in news releases by the American Academy of Neurology and by Vanderbilt – the “46% of normal” and “26% decline in recall” statistics. We liked that this story, unlike the MSNBC piece, stated that “when clinical experts rated overall change in the patients, they did not see a significant difference between the two groups.” That’s an important finding and, possibly, could have led to a different lead and headline for both stories. The story does not resort to disease-mongering. Like the MSNBC story, though, it could have more clearly distinguished between mild cognitive impairment and forgetfulness. We can’t give this a satisfactory score because, unlike the MSNBC story, this one does not include any information from clinical experts not involved in the study. It does, however, note that some of the authors on the study have received drug company funding and funding from tobacco makers. It also noted that the nicotine patches themselves were provided by Pfizer. There is no mention of alternative strategies to either improve or slow down the degradation of cognitive function in people with mild cognitive impairment. We’re going to rule this one Not Applicable because – while availability was not explicitly addressed – this is a product that’s probably well known to most readers. However, both stories we reviewed could have been more specific about the exact types of patches that were studied and in what doses. The story didn’t make any claims of novelty. However, the story could have briefly explained whether there has been other research studying nicotine’s effects on memory. (There has been.) As explained in the “evidence” criterion above, there were numbers used in this story and that by MSNBC that we couldn’t find anywhere in the journal article but which did appear in in news releases by the American Academy of Neurology and by Vanderbilt. But it’s clear that the story didn’t rely solely on news release, as it brought in enough good contextual information, including the conflict of interest information and the information about nicotine and cancer. Claim: Nicotine Patch May Improve Memory


Output: This was an ambitious piece for such a short amount of space. The story tries to cover all the relevant ground and give readers enough context to make sense of the findings. While we applaud some of the conflict of interest information it provides, it does not quote any independent sources. As we age, one of the things that worries us most is memory loss. So a drug that promises to restore  memory to nearly half of what it used to be is certain to be gain a lot of interest and attention. The most important line in the story is the caveat from the researchers themselves:  “whether these effects are clinically important will require larger studies.”