Twitter took down a tweet Trump retweeted that made false claims about the CDC and Coronavirus Deaths.
What We Know:
- Fake news regarding the CDC and the seriousness of the coronavirus has been surfacing on a lot of social media platforms, especially Facebook and Twitter. A recent tweet, that was retweeted by the president, held false claims that violated Twitter’s rules so it was removed.
- “This week the CDC quietly updated the COVID number to admit that only 6% of all the 153,504 deaths recorded actually died from COVID,” the post read. “That’s 9,210 deaths. The other 94% had 2-3 other serious illnesses & the overwhelming majority were of very advanced age.”
- It is true that the CDC updated their statistics, but it wasn’t “quietly”. The update said that for the 6% of the deaths included in its statistics, “Covid-19 was the only cause mentioned” on the death certificates. It does. This means that 6% of reported Covid-19 deaths “actually died” from Covid-19. This also does not mean that the other 94% died from other illnesses, it means that the other 94% had other illnesses that contributed to their deaths. For example, a person can have diabetes for years and then get infected with COVID and die quickly, therefore, COVID and diabetes would be on the death certificate.
- Before getting deleted, the post received about 39 thousand retweets, 50.8 thousand likes, and 7.3 thousand quotes. The tweet was created by Twitter user “Mel Q” who is a QAnon supporter. QAnon supporters are known to make false claims like the Wayfair child trafficking theory.
- There was another Tweet by Trump’s campaign adviser Jenna Ellis that linked to an article on the right-wing website Gateway Pundit that was based on the deleted tweet but it has not been deleted.
There are photos of the tweet floating around on the internet but comments on the tweet by Twitter users are not seen.
