CheckMate is a weekly newsletter from RMIT FactLab which recaps the latest in the world of fact checking and misinformation, drawing on the work of FactLab and its sister organisation, RMIT ABC Fact Check.
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CheckMate August 26, 2022
This week, we debunk social media posts suggesting Victoria's chief health officer spilled the beans by admitting COVID-19 vaccines were never effective.
We also tackle a claim that drivers trapped in an electric vehicle crash can't be rescued, and round up the latest in misinformation about the FBI's raid of former president Donald Trump's Florida residence.
No, Brett Sutton did not admit that COVID-19 vaccines never worked
Posts quoting Victoria's Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton, are being shared widely on social media, with users suggesting they prove what was long suspected: that COVID-19 vaccines never worked.
On Instagram, an anti-lockdown group juxtaposed two videos of the senior bureaucrat delivering seemingly contradictory messages alongside a caption that asked: "How can anyone believe these hypocrites? Who's paying them to lie to us[?]"
In the first clip, taken from a YouTube video published in April 2022, Professor Sutton says: "Getting that third dose is protection against … getting infected in the first place."
But in the second, taken from an August 1 media conference, he says: "Despite two, three, four doses of the vaccine, it's not so good at preventing infection in the first place."
That quote has been splashed across Telegram, Twitter and various conspiracy news sites, where it has been framed as "a direct contradiction of the lies he told" earlier and "a frank admission that vaccines simply do not work".
But in a statement to CheckMate, a spokesman for the Victorian Department of Health labelled the sharing of historical statements without context as "active disinformation".
"Data and evidence around COVID-19 changes as the virus changes and we have always reflected those changes in messaging and advice," he said.
So, what did Professor Sutton actually say?
The Chief Health Officer’s April advice was delivered when the dominant strain of SARS-CoV-2 was the Omicron variant BA.2 and before Australia had recorded any cases of BA.4 and BA.5, which were the dominant strains in Victoria by the time of his August media conference.
During that more recent conference, Professor Sutton said the vaccines were "not so good" at preventing infection with the BA.4 and BA.5 strains, but that they still "produce a bit of downward pressure on transmission".
Most critically, he said booster shots offered protection against severe outcomes among vulnerable groups such as the eldery, who stood to benefit from "a four-fold reduction in your risk of dying or being hospitalised".
Menno van Zelm, who heads the Allergy and Clinical Immunology Laboratory at Monash University’s Department of Immunology, told CheckMate that the science on vaccine effectiveness was a "moving playing field" that was always catching up.
"In April, we had Omicron, but most data that we had were from Delta," he explained.
Indeed, the then most recent advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) was that the evidence on boosters and Omicron was "evolving".
But it suggested that despite "gradual waning of immunity" over the months after receiving a booster, a third dose still offered some protection against symptomatic infection.
And it's worth remembering that, early in the pandemic, studies showed that two doses of Moderna and Pfizer's mRNA vaccines, for example, were highly effective at preventing infection.
By some estimates, they initially offered 85-95 per cent protection against the original Wuhan strain, and upwards of 85 per cent against the Alpha variant.
ATAGI has since written that a booster dose "augmented protection against infection" from the more severe Delta variant and provided "a substantial increase in the protective effectiveness against symptomatic disease and infection" from the more infectious Omicron.
Professor van Zelm explained that the evidence showed vaccines did protect against infection, "especially in the first month after vaccination".
However, he said, that protection was never 100 per cent in the first place, which meant that while vaccination clearly made a person's risk of infection "much lower", it would not protect everybody all of the time.
"And the variants are much better in escaping [an] immune response," he added.
"Delta is very well recognised [by the immune system], Omicron is not. And now especially with the BA.2, BA.4/5 … [the immune recognition] is even lower".
Still, Professor van Zelm said, that doesn't mean the vaccines and boosters offer no protection against infection. It just offers less than it once did, and this drops away faster.
But, echoing the advice of ATAGI, the European CDC and others, he told CheckMate: "The important part is that it protects especially vulnerable risk groups from severe COVID."
Is it impossible to remove people trapped in an electric vehicle crash?
As electric vehicles become increasingly popular, there has been an accompanying rise in online misinformation about the safety of high-voltage batteries.
One post on Facebook, which has been shared almost 10,000 times, claims that EV car crash victims are likely to die because first responders must disable the high-voltage battery before rescuing the occupants.
But as RMIT FactLab found this week, the claim that "the problem with crashing any EV is that if you are trapped, you're dead, as it is impossible to remove victims" is incorrect.
While the post claimed that the only way to safely rescue people trapped in an EV after an accident was by directly accessing and disabling its high-voltage battery, experts said this wasn't the case.
In fact, disconnecting the car's 12-volt battery (which is usually located under the bonnet and is standard in all cars, not just EVs) also disables the high-voltage battery, while in the case of a collision in which its airbags are deployed, an EV will automatically isolate the high-voltage battery on impact.
Experts consulted by FactLab also rubbished a suggestion that three pairs of gloves — cotton, rubber and leather — were required by law to be worn when disconnecting electrical components of an EV involved in a crash.
"There are no laws stating that responders should wear three pairs of gloves," said Emma Sutcliffe, the director of EV FireSafe, an Australian project funded by the Department of Defence to research and advise on electric vehicle battery fires and emergency responses.
The post also asserts that an EV battery fire cannot be extinguished with water because "water makes lithium burn", a claim that has been repeatedly debunked by other fact-checking organisations.
Fact checking the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago
Perhaps unsurprisingly, news earlier this month that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had raided former president Donald Trump's Florida residence at his Mar-a-Lago resort has been met with an onslaught of online misinformation.
FactCheck.org, for instance, found that there was no evidence the raid, which involved a search of Mar-a-Lago for classified records that had been removed from the White House, was a politically motivated attack launched by President Joe Biden.
Additionally, fact checkers at AFP rubbished suggestions that social media users had published a recording of a phone call between Mr Biden and the FBI. Social media experts said the claims may have been an attempt by some to increase followers.
Meanwhile, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who compared the FBI to the Gestapo, did not appear on video crying and stating that his former boss was "going to jail", PolitiFact reported.
Those fact checkers likewise discovered that Republican senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, did not "erupt" while reprimanding the FBI director over the raid: the video purportedly showing this outburst featured two clips of Senator Cruz from 2020 and 2021, long before the Mar-a-Lago raid.
PolitiFact also ruled that claims of leaked messages between former president Barack Obama and Bruce Reinhart, the judge who signed the warrant allowing the search of Mar-a-Lago, were "false".
Despite suggestions that Judge Reinhart and Mr Obama were in cahoots, the fact checkers could find "no evidence" that any such messages existed.
And that wasn't the only fake post involving Mr Obama: AP Fact Check put to bed claims that he had himself kept classified documents after leaving the White House.
"Obama administration records are exclusively held and maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency confirmed on Friday," the fact checkers said.
"Millions of unclassified documents were transferred after Obama left office to a NARA facility in Chicago, but neither Obama's personal foundation nor the facility set to house his presidential memorabilia have control over those papers."
Is labour's share of GDP at its 'lowest' since 1960?
On the eve of the Albanese government's two-day jobs and skills summit in Canberra, ACTU secretary Sally McManus flagged "workers' share of our overall wealth" as among the "serious issues" needing to be addressed.
"Labour's share in the GDP [gross domestic product] is at its lowest level; it hasn't been at this point since 1960," she told ABC TV's Afternoon Briefing.
"That's a shameful situation for us to be in as a country."
RMIT ABC Fact Check this week found that claim to be a fair call.
Figures published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) show that, since 1959, the compensation of employees as a share of the nation's GDP has never been lower.
The chart above, produced by Fact Check using data from the ABS, shows how compensation of employees as a share of GDP recently dropped below 46 per cent for the first time on record.
While concurring, experts noted that in making her point, Ms McManus had referred to workers' share of Australia's "wealth", which was a different economic concept to labour's share of income, which is measured as a proportion of the nation's GDP.
There is no perfect measure for workers' share of wealth, they said.
Edited by Ellen McCutchan and David Campbell
Got a fact that needs checking? Tweet us @ABCFactCheck or send us an email at factcheck@rmit.edu.au
