The Whoppers of 2021
Summary
Mass rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines has been the defining story of 2021, yet for all its success, vaccination rates remain stubbornly low in some populations.
As with all things in American life these days, partisanship has played an outsized role: an estimated four in 10 Republicans, for example, remain unvaccinated, according to a November Kaiser Family Foundation survey. With more than 400 million doses administered to date, the vaccines have proven to be very safe and effective — especially at preventing hospitalization and death — yet misinformation continues to drive vaccine hesitancy among many Americans.
At FactCheck.org, we spent much of our efforts in 2021 addressing vaccine misinformation, and so as we consider our whoppers of the year, those stories come to the forefront of the discussion.
Another prominent line of misinformation is a carry-over from 2020, former President Donald Trump’s continued insistence that massive voter fraud caused him to lose the 2020 election. The president’s false claims came to a head in a fact-challenged Jan. 6 speech in Washington, D.C. that preceded a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol while Congress was meeting to certify then-President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
Despite fact-checkers’ best efforts to meticulously debunk many of the former president’s baseless election claims, the idea has gained traction among a majority of Republicans and has been used to justify new election laws in many GOP-led states.
And, of course, we fact-checked numerous claims made by, and about, the new Biden administration, which took office this year. Among the false claims: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s statement that “all” Americans who wanted to leave Afghanistan were evacuated by early September, and Republican claims that Biden had plans to drastically cut U.S. red meat consumption and force families to sell their farms.
Analysis
On Dec. 14, 2020, a registered nurse in New York City became the first U.S. resident to receive a COVID-19 vaccine outside of a clinical trial. Reflecting the hope that many people felt at the time, Sandra Lindsey told ABC News, “I see a light at the end of the tunnel.”
It has been a year since the first vaccine was administered and, as of Dec. 14, more than 480 million vaccines have been given to nearly 240 million people in the U.S. — 72.1% of the total U.S. population.
This has been the year of the COVID-19 vaccine.
But 2021 was also the year of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. The vaccines have been proven to be safe and effective, and yet anti-vaxxers twisted the facts and in some cases made up fanciful and fictional accounts
