NOT REAL NEWS: A look at what didn’t happen this week

A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:

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CLAIM: A Pfizer warehouse in North Carolina damaged by a tornado was stocked with the company’s COVID-19 vaccine.

THE FACTS: Pfizer does not manufacture or store its COVID-19 vaccine or treatment for the disease at the facility, a company representative told the AP. The tornado on Wednesday ripped the roof of the drugmaker’s factory near Rocky Mount, North Carolina — potentially disrupting drug supplies at U.S. hospitals. But the news quickly gave rise to false claims online that the twister had struck a site specifically storing doses of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine — which has been the center of persistent misinformation since its release in December 2020. “BREAKING: A Pfizer Warehouse that was stocked with COVID-19 vaccines was just destroyed by a tornado in Rocky Mountain, North Carolina,” reads one popular tweet. The plant in question is not used to manufacture or store any doses of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine, Comirnaty, said Pfizer spokesperson Pam Eisele. Nor is the site used to make or store Paxlovid, the company’s pill used to treat those who get sick with the disease. Instead, the plant produces injectables like drugs used in IV infusions or that are delivered under the skin or into patient muscles. Some examples include anesthesia drugs and anti-infectives, typically used to treat things such as fungal infections. Pfizer has said all employees were safely evacuated and accounted for, and that it is still assessing damage.

— Associated Press writer Angelo Fichera in New Jersey contributed this report.

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CLAIM: Video shows deadly mosquitoes released at a Baltimore music festival.

THE FACTS: While concertgoers were swarmed by flying insects at one point during an African American music festival last month, concert goers said they were not bitten by mosquitoes but gnats. Experts said swarming mosquitoes would behave differently than the bugs in the video. The Baltimore Health Department also said no insect-borne illnesses were reported following the event. Social media users are nevertheless sharing a video clip they claim shows hordes of killer skeeters dumped on unwitting concertgoers in Maryland’s largest city. The clip pans across a crowd of revelers at a park, many of whom are vigorously waving hats, blankets and other personal items to try and shoo away the teeny pests. “Helicopter released deadly mosquitoes in Baltimore, MD AFRAM 2023,” the text on the video reads. The idea could have been pulled straight from the history books: a Cold War-era military program called Operation Big Buzz involved dropping thousands of mosquitoes across George and Florida in order to see whether the insects could be used in disease warfare. But the airborne invasion at the Baltimore concert wasn’t a swarm of mosquitoes, some of which are known to transmit diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, dengue and Zika, which can be fatal if left untreated. Concert attendees described the bugs as gnats, which are small flying insects that tend to travel en masse. “Y’all can deal with the gnats. Y’all dealt with the cicadas, you can handle the gnats,” Mayor Brandon Scott implored attendees from the stage at one point. “Calm down. Calm down.” Beige Ojai, a Maryland resident who shared a video of the swarm on TikTok, told the AP that the gnats filled her hair and covered her arms but didn’t leave any bites. “They were stuck onto our skin, flying down people’s shirts, flying into people’s hair,” Ojai recounted in an email Tuesday. “They were completely stuck onto my sisters’ eyelashes— her eyelashes were filled with gnats! ” The city health department also hasn’t received any reports of bug-borne illness following the June 17 event, according to Arinze Ifekauche, an agency spokesperson. “I’m assuming they were the normal bugs you’d encounter in a City Park,” he wrote in an email. “We do know definitively that they were not killer bugs dropped from a helicopter— as evidenced by the lack of deaths from said suspected bugs.” What’s more, insect experts say the swarms captured on video aren’t indicative of mosquitoes. Michael Raupp, an entomologist at the University of Maryland, suggested they could be “eye gnats,” which are attracted to the face and eyes. Those gnats breed in lawns like the grassy field at Druid Hill Park where the Juneteenth celebration took place.

— Associated Press writer Philip Marcelo in New York contributed this report.

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CLAIM: The U.S. Department of Justice said international child sex trafficking is not an area of concern.

THE FACTS: The Justice Department has made no such declaration. The agency acknowledged that it recently updated language on its website, including removing a lengthy passage about international child sex trafficking from one page. But the DOJ says the issue is more thoroughly covered elsewhere on the site, namely as part of its recently released national strategy on preventing child exploitation. The agency also cited several recent cases it prosecuted that dealt with international sex trafficking. Social media users, however, are claiming the nation’s primary law enforcement agency is de-emphasizing efforts to combat international child sex trafficking because it removed a subsection in its website titled “ International Sex Trafficking of Minors.” The passage was found on the webpage outlining various “subject areas” covered by the agency’s “Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section,” which is the unit focused on prosecuting child exploitation cases. It had been part of a broader section describing child sex trafficking updated in May, according to a timestamp on the webpage. “Wow!!! And did you know that Joe’s DOJ just said that ‘International Sex Trafficking of Minors’ was not an area of concern and removed it from their list of offenses that deserve a high degree of attention?,” wrote one Instagram user in a post. But there’s nothing to suggest the agency has removed international sex trafficking from any list of high priority offenses or pulled back on its efforts to crackdown on the scourge. “Child sex trafficking” remains one of the “subject areas” highlighted on the webpage for the Child Exploitation and Obscenity unit, but it no longer distinguishes between “international” and “domestic” offenses. The website update also comes as the DOJ has released a new strategy to address child sex trafficking, as well as other forms of child exploitation. In an emailed statement, the DOJ said it continues to place a “very high priority on and devote substantial resources” to fighting child exploitation and sex trafficking abroad and at home. The agency cited several recent prosecutions involving international child sex trafficking found in press releases for the Child Exploitation and Obscenity unit. Submitted to Congress last month, the DOJ’s “ National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction ” is meant to lay out long-range goals for reducing child exploitation, including budget and funding priorities, a review of past and ongoing investigations and prosecutions, grant programs, policy, research and other related efforts. A series of detailed reports focused on specific areas of child exploitation was also released with the new national strategy, the DOJ noted. The agency said the documents, when taken together, represent the “most up to date information” about the complex, ever-evolving challenges around child exploitation. Alicia Peters, an anthropology professor at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine, who focuses on human trafficking, said the updated website language helps “rebalance the disproportionate focus on child sex trafficking” previously found on the DOJ site. Peters noted that people are trafficked not just for sex but also to work in industries ranging from domestic work to agriculture and manufacturing.

— Philip Marcelo

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CLAIM: A video of ships being engulfed by an enormous sandstorm shows weather that is heading toward U.S. states including Florida and New York.

THE FACTS: The video shows a June sandstorm in Egypt as it blew over the Suez Canal. Although dust from the Sahara Desert has reached Florida multiple times this summer — a common occurrence known as the Saharan Air Layer — the sandstorm in the video has nothing to do with this phenomenon, meteorologists told the AP. The video misrepresented by social media users includes two separate clips. In one, a monolithic plume of sand encroaches on a cargo ship that appears miniscule in comparison. The second shows the sand engulfing the boat from which the video is being filmed, until hardly anything is visible. “Sandstorm about to hit Florida,” reads a TikTok post that shared the footage. It had received approximately 1.1 million views as of Thursday. The video was also shared with the false claim on Facebook and Twitter, where some suggested it would hit New York as well. But the video shows a sandstorm in Egypt early last month as it hit the Suez Canal, and users are falsely conflating it with news about dust from the Sahara Desert that regularly crosses the North Atlantic this time of year. A Facebook user first posted a longer version of the footage on June 1 with the caption, “Sand Storm at Bitter Lake, Suez Egypt,” referring to the saltwater lake that is part of the canal. The user did not return a request for comment, but other social media posts support the accuracy of the caption. The same account shared a photo posted by another Facebook user of a container ship seen in the video. The latter user has shared multiple photos from aboard an oil and chemical tanker named “ Eva Usuki,” whose characteristics match the ship from which the video was filmed. For example, both have a large, central tan crane near a collection of blue barrels. The boat also flies under the flag of the Philippines, and people can be heard speaking in Tagalog in the background of the original footage. The Eva Usuki was in the Suez Canal on June 1, according to ship tracking data. Other news outlets reporting on the sandstorm also posted similarfootage at the time, showing different ships being engulfed by the cloud. Multiple meteorologists told the AP that this sandstorm did not and will not impact the U.S. And it has nothing to do with the Saharan Air Layer, a mass of extremely dry and dusty air that forms over the Sahara Desert and moves across the North Atlantic from late spring to early fall, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “The video definitely showed a sandstorm, which definitely has a clear leading edge of dust that is at the ground and extends upward from there,” said Stephen Mullens, an assistant instructional professor of meteorology at the University of Florida. “What is coming across the Atlantic Ocean is still sand and dust, but we’d definitely not call it a sandstorm at all.”

— Associated Press writer Melissa Goldin in New York contributed this report.