COVID-19 update: Tuesday, November 9, 2021
- Ginger Cameron, PhD
- Nov 9, 2021
- 3 min read
Just clearing up some Fake News about Luciferase, and the vaccine causing cancer.
A shout-out to NewsLiteracy and The Sift for doing a lot of the heavy lifting today. It made my fact-checking of their fact-checking much faster.
Fake news items 1:
NO: COVID-19 vaccines do not contain a bioluminescent marker called luciferase. NO: COVID-19 vaccines do not contain tracking devices. YES: Emerald Robinson, the White House correspondent for Newsmax, a conservative news outlet, pushed both of these false claims in a Nov. 1 tweet. YES: According to the Snopes fact-checking site, “Luciferase is a genuine scientific term that refers to an enzyme capable of emitting light,” such as in fireflies. YES: The enzymes are commonly used in research, including some research for COVID-19 vaccines, to trace how viruses and vaccines interact with cells. NO: The vaccines themselves do not contain these enzymes. NO: The luciferase enzymes are not related to Satan or the Book of Revelation.
FROM - NewsLit takeaway: False claims about the COVID-19 vaccines containing tracking devices are among the most common and longstanding viral falsehoods about the shots, and are often baselessly connected to references in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. Robinson has a history of promoting vaccine misinformation on Twitter, where she has more than 430,000 followers. The Nov. 1 tweet (above) was removed by Twitter, and Robinson was temporarily suspended from the platform. Newsmax disavowed Robinson’s statement and later said Robinson would not appear on the air while it reviews her posts.
As a note of interest - the Bible clearly states that the mark of the beast will be in your forehead or hand. The vaccine is in neither. Should someone attempt to put the vaccine in your forehead or hand - run. Run fast and far and report them because they are a lunatic.
Fake News Item 2:
NO: COVID-19 vaccines don’t cause cancer or HIV. NO: Extensive data from clinical trials and from the global vaccine rollout — which now tops 7 billion administered doses — show no link between the shots and cancer or HIV. YES: Multiple screenshots of comments — referred to as SCs in the post — were shared by this same account as an attempt to “support” this claim. NO: These anecdotes aren’t evidence of a connection.
NewsLit takeaway: Rumors that mistake coincidental events — in this case, the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines with anecdotes of people getting diagnosed with cancer and HIV — rely on the logical fallacy of questionable cause, or confusing correlation with causation. Additionally, this rumor commits the base rate fallacy by ignoring the typical rate at which people are diagnosed with cancer and HIV — and failing to account for the growing percentage of the population that is vaccinated. In other words, with 67% of the American population now vaccinated with at least one dose, a significant portion of people who are diagnosed with cancer — or any other health condition — will also, coincidentally, be vaccinated. These same fallacies have driven falsehoods about coincidental deaths and COVID-19 cases as well as misinformation involving the vaccinated in Israel.
Remember, when ice cream sales go up, so does crime. These are coincidental. Buying ice cream, or even the consumption of ice cream - does not cause people to commit crime. Association is not causation (if you have ever taken a stats class from me you have heard me say this about a million times).
FINAL THOUGHTS: Sometimes you just gotta shake your head and eat cheesecake.
Very briefly, Lucifer is not even a name of Satan in the Bible. In Latin, the word for morning star is Lucifer, which means light-bearer. This is the only time Satan is referred to in this way and the “name” is not repeated. So you might as well call Satan “Venus” which is the English name for the morning star. We don’t do that, for good reason. Also, pretty sure Dr. Cameron already covered this elsewhere but there was a vaccine candidate withdrawn in Australia because it caused false-positive HIV tests. It did not cause actual HIV infection and proves that the system, designed to protect the public from undue harm, works.
On the thoughts on Revelation, not only is the Mark of the Beast said to be on the Forehead or hand, but when you read the whole bible you see an interesting trend. In the old testament the Hebrews were told to put the words of god on your forehead and hand, as symbols of having it in your mind (head) and in your actions (hand.) Jesus basically confirms this when he complains that the pharisees like to actually put little scrolls on their foreheads but their hearts were not right. So it stands to reason that the mark of the beast is symbolic for thinking and doing deeds that are not of God, and not any kind of physical…