Fake news about covid is rife on social media. This week, videos shared thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter in a week claimed that applesauce would be tested. “positive“to SARS-CoV-2. An example used to demonstrate the unreliability of antigenic testing for coronavirus.

No covid in the compote!

But as several experts explained to AFP, the tests are only designed to detect the virus in the type of sample for which they were evaluated. Having them “test” something else, like compote, doesn’t prove anything.

“Our task is to make sure that the test provides reliable results in humans. Applying it to food products does not mean that there is doubt about its validity for detecting SARS-CoV-2“, explained the manufacturer of the test to AFP. Especially since in the videos shared, nothing proves that the tests were used correctly.

No fetal cells in vaccines

Other “fake news“which has raged this week: the presence of fetal cells in vaccines. This infox had already been circulating for years on social networks. But it has been brought up to date by targeting AstraZeneca’s anti-covid vaccine.

It is still wrong. Like others, this vaccine is developed thanks to a “cell line“. These are cell cultures originally obtained from an aborted fetus in the 1960s. However, there are no fetal cells in vaccines using this technique, as indicated. several experts interviewed by AFP.

No Pfizer vaccine related paralysis

Another vaccine, another untruth: a publication, shared several thousand times on Facebook in 24 hours, states that during clinical trials of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine “4.6% of people” have been “with very severe facial paralysis and lymph node involvement“.

This is not what the data made public show: four people (out of just over 18,000, or 0.022%) developed facial paralysis, without it being possible to attribute it with certainty to the vaccine. And 64 (0.3%) developed lymph node damage.