CoronaCheck is RMIT ABC Fact Check’s weekly email newsletter dedicated to fighting the misinformation infodemic surrounding the coronavirus outbreak.

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CoronaCheck #51

While most of the coronavirus misinformation covered in this newsletter has been shared online, COVID conspiracies can also proliferate offline. This week, we’ve taken a look at a flyer distributed to letterboxes in federal Labor MP Chris Bowen’s community.

We’ve also covered a new report that looks into the most prolific COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, and bring you a dispatch from India.

Letterbox drops spread virus misinformation offline

In the latest example of coronavirus misinformation moving offline, a flyer distributed to letterboxes in the electorate of federal Labor MP and opposition spokesman for health Chris Bowen, which contains a slew of false claims about the pandemic, and encourages people to watch a widely discredited documentary.

“Concerning to see dangerous conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine disinformation being spread through letter boxes in our local community,” Mr Bowen posted on Facebook above the image.

“This sort of propaganda is dangerous. If friends or family raise this with you, please advise them to get their COVID information from official and reliable sources,” he wrote.

Declaring that “the media is lying to you about COVID-19”, the flyer claims that the pandemic is a “front” for the enforcement of mandatory vaccines containing microchips, that doctors and hospitals are “paid thousands of dollars” to record COVID-19 cases and deaths, and that testing kits made in China are “faulty”.

“COVID-19 is no more harmful or contagious than the common flu,” the flyer reads. “It has a 99.98 per cent recovery rate. IT IS NOT A PANDEMIC.”

Each of these claims is incorrect.

There is no evidence to support conspiracy theories suggesting that vaccines would be used to “microchip” the population, but this hasn’t stopped such claims from gaining traction throughout the pandemic.

Back in May, fact checkers at the BBC’s Reality Check found that rumours that billionaire Bill Gates was behind a push to implant trackable microchips in people through a COVID-19 vaccine had no basis. Nevertheless, a YouGOV poll suggested 28 per cent of Americans believed in the conspiracy.

Reality Check said that while a study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had examined whether it was possible to store a person’s vaccine records in special ink applied to a person’s skin at the same time as a jab, the technology involved an “invisible tattoo” rather than a microchip.

“[The technology] has not been rolled out yet, would not allow people to be tracked and personal information would not be entered into a database,” Reality Check quoted Ana Jaklenec, a scientist involved in the study, as saying.

Also bogus is the flyer’s claim that doctors and hospitals are paid to record COVID-19 cases and deaths.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health told Fact Check in an email that all claims contained in the flyer, including those relating to payments, were “false”.

Fact Check debunked a similar claim earlier this year when a caller to a Sydney radio station suggested that nursing homes in Melbourne were recording deaths not related to coronavirus as being caused by COVID-19 in order to receive payments.

Both the Victorian and Commonwealth health authorities, as well as the peak body representing aged care homes, denied making any such payments.

Similarly, Fact Check could find no evidence that testing kits used in Australia were “faulty”.

While the Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, had issued a warning over “faulty” home COVID-19 test kits in April, the alert referred to kits unapproved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

“The TGA has confirmed that the test kits are not registered for use in Australia and the importers did not have approval to import them,” Mr Dutton said in a media release.

“The only approved tests for COVID-19 in Australia currently are laboratory-based tests or tests that can be used by health professionals at the point of care such as in hospitals or clinics.”

Finally, the flyer’s claim that COVID-19 has a “recovery rate” of 99.98 per cent and is no more harmful than the flu also doesn’t stack up.

A regularly updated document produced by US-based global authority Johns Hopkins Medicine notes that while the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve, the mortality rate of the disease is “thought to be substantially higher (possibly 10 times or more) than that of most strains of the flu”.

Is the Federal Government responsible for quarantine?

Victorian contact tracers were sent scrambling this week when two international travellers skipped quarantine in Sydney and flew to Melbourne, forcing 176 passengers and crew into two weeks’ isolation.

As it happens, it’s not the first time a passenger has been mistakenly waived through to Melbourne without first quarantining themselves.

NSW Police owned up to the latest bungle, but not before a lively debate on social media saw the Australian Border Force (ABF) go into damage control.

The ABF argued that its quarantining responsibilities end once passengers clear customs and immigration, at which point responsibility “passes to state and territory authorities for hotel quarantine and onwards domestic travel if relevant”.

However, a former head of Australia’s federal quarantine program, Paul Barratt, said that was “simply not true”.

“The Commonwealth has constitutional responsibility for quarantine,” Mr Barratt tweeted.

Indeed, experts told Fact Check the constitution (under Section 51(ix)) grants the Commonwealth the power to create laws relating to quarantine. (In the case of the pandemic, the most relevant law is the Biosecurity Act 2015, which gives the health minister sweeping powers to quarantine people.)

But there is nothing to prevent states from enacting their own quarantine laws using their residual powers; for example, the NSW Government has relied on its Public Health Act 2010 to order disembarking passengers into quarantine and medical facilities.

As the Federal Government’s national review of hotel quarantine explains, travellers can be quarantined under either state law or federal law, and the Commonwealth’s quarantine powers “may be exercised concurrently with the states and territories”.

Sydney University professor Anne Twomey said that, importantly, the constitution does not force the Commonwealth to use its quarantine power.

“The Commonwealth can leave such matters to be dealt with under state laws if it chooses.”

Separately, Sydney Airport is considered to be a place over which the constitution grants the Commonwealth exclusive power (s52[i]).

However, Professor Twomey noted that the Commonwealth had long ago adopted legislation for such places to pick up and apply the laws of the state which, unless expressly ruled out, cover public health. (This was to avoid a situation where, for example, someone could avoid being arrested for murder, which is a state crime.)

Cheryl Saunders, a laureate professor emeritus at Melbourne University, told Fact Check that the Commonwealth had not delegated its quarantining power during the pandemic but simply not exercised it.

“And so it becomes a state responsibility,” she said.

Still, both experts said it was surprising the National Cabinet, which comprises state, territory and federal governments, had agreed to place the burden of the hotel quarantine system on the states, given, for example, the Federal Government’s greater financial capacity.

The types of vaccine misinformation to look out for

As the world prepares for the widespread rollout of coronavirus vaccines, misinformation researchers at First Draft have identified the key narratives taking hold within vaccine-related conversations online.

By examining 1,200 of the most influential vaccine-related social media posts in English, Spanish and French from June to September, First Draft found that two themes dominated the vaccine conversation: posts referring to the political and economic motives behind vaccines, and posts referring to the safety and necessity of vaccines.

Photos and videos accounted for 51 per cent of the content scrutinised, the researchers said, while Facebook and Instagram carried the bulk of the content (71 per cent).

The report found COVID-19 and vaccine conspiracies played an “outsized role” on social media, and that content referring to Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates made up 6 per cent of the database.

“Organisations’ links to Gates are used to poison their legitimacy and undermine trust in the vaccines they are working to develop,” First Draft noted.

Misinformation as to the way in which the coronavirus vaccines utilise ribonucleic acid (RNA) and DNA was also popular.

“The types of claims and narratives within these topics, as well as the complete absence of neutral, fact-based, informative posts, underlined the significance of this data deficit,” the report concluded.

“Certain posts claimed Moderna’s new potential COVID-19 vaccine will change people’s DNA, and some posts presented the mRNA vaccine as the definitive future COVID-19 vaccine or discredited any future COVID-19 vaccine altogether.”

Other posts, the researchers said, falsely linked the Moderna vaccine to “targeted depopulation efforts”.

Meanwhile, a lack of “clear, reliable information detailing the steps involved in the vaccine development process, the scientific norms associated with it and what ultimately constitutes a ‘safe’ vaccine” had paved the way for the proliferation of unscrutinised vaccine information.

“For example, numerous unverified accounts presenting themselves as news sources or health specialists reported the unveiling of the Russian vaccine ‘Sputnik V’ in an uncritically positive and largely decontextualized manner,” First Draft found.

“These reports failed to highlight the fact that the vaccine was approved before it had gone through large-scale Phase 3 trials, which provoked widespread concern and objections from the scientific community.”

Conversely, in some cases, an oversupply of information was to blame for a lack of clarity among the social media posts examined, such as in the case of the frantic reporting on vaccine trials and the “race” to secure the first effective jab.

According to the researchers, much of this reporting did not contextualise the “race” or seek to make sense of it, with much of it based solely on press releases from pharmaceutical companies and thus subject to so-called “pharma-spin”.

“This deluge of reporting — much of which may be biased toward the interests of pharmaceutical companies — leaves many more questions than answers, creating more spaces vulnerable to speculation and misinformation.”

From India

With coronavirus cases nearing 10 million and deaths topping 139,000, India, like the rest of the world, faces a battle not just with COVID-19, but with the infodemic of misinformation related to the virus.

In one recent example, fact checkers at Misbar found that a viral video appearing to show overcrowding at a Calcutta train station in the midst of the pandemic was filmed in late 2018, more than a year before the first cases of COVID-19 were reported.