Viral Video Repeats Bogus Claim About Vaccines and Visible Ailments
SciCheck Digest
A video repeating the claim that COVID-19 vaccines are responsible for the sudden onset of various visible ailments — such as fainting and facial paralysis — is making the rounds, again. But, just like the other, similar posts we’ve addressed, there’s no support for this one, either.
Full Story
Despite a lack of evidence, the prevailing anti-vaccination claim that COVID-19 shots have caused the sudden onset of visible ailments — most commonly, collapsing — is still going strong.
We’ve debunked several versions of this claim over the years — including that athletes are collapsing at higher rates than they used to because of COVID-19 vaccination (they’re not) and that people are dying suddenly of blood clots caused by the vaccines as part of a plot to depopulate the world (they’re not).
This time the claim has been repackaged in a TikTok video that’s garnered more than 2 million views and has been copied on other platforms, including Facebook.
The video splices together clips of Candace Owens, John MacArthur and Ice Cube — all of whom have expressed opposition to vaccines — with clips of about a dozen people experiencing some type of medical issue. Owens is a conservative political commentator and well-known anti-vaccine advocate; John MacArthur is a mega-church pastor who defied public health orders during the pandemic and provided his followers with religious-exemption forms for the vaccine; and Ice Cube is a rapper who claims to have been shut out of opportunities because he refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19. None of the incidents featured in the video have been tied to vaccination.
We’ll walk through each of the examples in the video:
Royal guard: The video starts off with a rapid, three-second long burst of clips showing various people falling and a picture of actor Jamie Foxx (we’ll get to him later). The first frame shows a British royal guard faint while watching over Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin in 2022.
The incident happened at about 12:30 a.m. on the first in which the queen was .
