Researchers Say HHS Vaccine Memo Twisted Their Data
PLUS: Bogus Evidence that Alleged Minnesota Shooter is a Democrat; Pentagon Falsely Accused of Using AI; Lavish Army Meal Does Not Mean Deployment
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In today’s edition, researchers tell us that two of their studies were misinterpreted in a memo to Congress from the Department of Health and Human Services to justify its decision to stop recommending COVID vaccines to pregnant women. We debunk the “evidence” used to claim that the alleged Minnesota shooter is a Democrat, show how liberals falsely blamed AI for a legitimate Pentagon military parade photo, and unpack a viral falsehood that U.S. troops received “deployment meals,” as proof they are headed to Iran.
Plus: Introducing NewsGuard’s Iranian State-Affiliated False Claims Tracker
Today’s newsletter was edited by Sofia Rubinson and Eric Effron.
1. Researchers Say HHS Memo to Congress Twisted Their Work to Back RFK Jr.'s Anti- Vaccine Agenda
By John Gregory
A memo sent to Congress by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services misrepresented medical studies to justify the agency’s decision to stop recommending COVID-19 vaccines to pregnant women, the studies’ authors have told NewsGuard.
The HHS memo sent to lawmakers, which was first published by KFF Health News (NewsGuard Trust Score: 100/100) on June 13, 2025, includes a section about the scientific evidence that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. relied on in his decision to remove the COVID vaccine from the recommended vaccine schedule during pregnancy.
The memo stated: “A number of studies in pregnant women showed higher rates of fetal loss if vaccination was received before 20 weeks of pregnancy.” A footnote said that this statement was based on a March 2024 study of 246,000 Canadian women published in the peer-reviewed British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
However, NewsGuard found that the study in question did not identify a link between COVID vaccination and an increased risk of miscarriage. The study’s lead author, Dr. Maria Velez, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at McGill University in Montreal, confirmed this finding to NewsGuard.
“[T]he HHS document misinterpreted our study results,” Velez said in a June 16, 2025, email to NewsGuard. Asked if she believes that her work supported the new HHS recommendation that pregnant women should not get a COVID vaccine, Velez answered, “No, on the contrary, our study provides evidence to inform policy makers, healthcare providers, pregnant women and those considering a pregnancy about the safety of [COVID] vaccination in relation to miscarriage risk.”
Asked about the researchers’ charges that their work was misrepresented, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon defended the memo’s interpretation of Velez’s study. “The underlying data speaks for itself — and it raises legitimate safety concerns,” Nixon said in a June 18, 2025, email to NewsGuard. “HHS will not ignore that evidence or downplay early pregnancy loss. It is disturbing that NewsGuard appears to dismiss the significance of the underlying data. Every miscarriage is a tragedy. Suggesting otherwise is offensive to the families who have experienced that loss.”
However, as noted above, the study actually did not find that COVID vaccines were linked to miscarriages.
The HHS memo also stated, “Yet another study showed an increase in placental blood clotting in pregnant mothers who took the vaccine.” However, the research cited to back this claim — a study of the risk of COVID vaccine side effects that included 99 million people published in the journal Vaccine in February 2024 — contains no such data, NewsGuard found.
Again, a researcher who co-authored the study confirmed that the work was misrepresented.
“Our study does not even look at a cohort of pregnant women, and we don’t include ‘placental blood clotting’ as an outcome,” study co-author Anders Hviid, the head of epidemiological research at Denmark’s Statens Serum Institut, told NewsGuard in a June 16, 2025, email. Hviid added that the HHS memo’s interpretation of the study “is not particularly confidence inspiring.”
NewsGuard also asked the HHS press office about the study published in the journal Vaccine described above. Nixon, the HHS spokesperson, did not address this study in his June 18, 2025, email to NewsGuard. He defended the HHS memo more broadly in an earlier statement to KFF Health News, saying, “There is no distortion of the studies in this document.”
The HHS memo also did not mention the abundant evidence supporting the safety of COVID vaccines during pregnancy. Indeed, the website of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency that Kennedy now oversees, states, “Studies including hundreds of thousands of people around the world show that COVID-19 vaccination before and during pregnancy is safe, effective, and beneficial to both the pregnant woman and the baby.”
False narratives about the purported dangers of COVID vaccines to pregnant women and their babies have been frequently promoted by anti-vaccine activists, including Kennedy, since the vaccines became available in late 2020.
NewsGuard’s RFK Jr. Healthcare Claims Depository, which has documented 106 provably false health claims advanced by Kennedy and the anti-vaccine nonprofit he founded, Children’s Health Defense, lists four false narratives related to COVID vaccines and pregnancy. These include claims that the vaccines have increased infant mortality rates and that they cause miscarriages.
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2. False Claim of the Week: The Suspect in the June 2025 Assassination of a Minnesota State Lawmaker Is a Democrat
NewsGuard’s “False Claim of the Week” highlights a false claim from NewsGuard’s Misinformation Fingerprints proprietary database of provably false claims and their debunks. The claim that the suspect in the June 2025 assassination of a Minnesota state lawmaker, Vance Boelter, is a Democrat was deemed the “False Claim of the Week” due to its widespread appearance across social media platforms and websites, its high engagement levels, and the high-profile nature of the sources promoting it. Given those three factors — in addition to its significant subject matter — its potential for harm makes it our False Claim of the Week.
Debunk: Fake ‘Evidence’ Pegging Minnesota Shooting Suspect as a Liberal Democrat
By Sam Howard and Sarah Komar
What happened: In the days following the shooting of two Democratic lawmakers and their spouses in Minnesota, right-wing social media users have shifted from making vague claims that the suspected shooter is a left-wing Democrat to promoting fabricated evidence to render that claim more convincing.
Context: Early on June 14, Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman, state Sen. John Hoffman, and their spouses were shot in their suburban Minneapolis homes, in “politically motivated” attacks, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said in a June 14 press conference. Hortman and her husband, Mark, died, while Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were critically wounded. After a two-day manhunt, Vance Boelter, 57, was arrested and charged with murder and other crimes, U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said during a June 16 press conference.
A closer look: As Reality Check reported earlier this week, conservatives on social media were quick to label Boelter a liberal and a Democrat. In the ensuing days, they cited a range of supposed evidence to make this narrative more convincing.
NewsGuard has identified three prominent false claims falsely linking Boelter to Democratic causes.
Fake Walz link: Conservatives are falsely claiming that the wife of Vance Boelter, Jennifer Boelter, interned for Walz, the former Democratic vice-presidential candidate, in 2010, when Walz served in the House of Representatives. The accounts cited congressional pay documents from 2010 that show that a Jennifer Boelter interned in Walz’s House office from August to December 2010.
Actually: Vance Boelter’s wife is named Jennifer Boelter. However, asked if Vance Boelter’s wife interned from then-Rep. Walz, Claire Lancaster, director of communications for Gov. Walz’s office, told NewsGuard in a June 16 email, “No, she did not.” The Minnesota Star-Tribune (Trust Score: 100/100) reported on June 15 that a different Jennifer Boelter interned for Walz’s office in 2010, citing a Walz spokesperson.
T-shirt hoax: Right-leaning accounts shared a photo supposedly showing Boelter wearing a “Resist” T-shirt illustrated with a handgun, standing next to a woman wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “I think therefore I am…a Democrat”. Some social media users also claimed the woman was Boelter’s wife, Jennifer.
Actually: Neither of the Boelters is in the photograph. The photo shows a pair of Texas Democrats, Houston lawyer Brandon Trachtenberg and his wife Lillie Schechter, a former chair of the Harris County Democratic Party, attending a June 14, 2025, anti-Trump rally in Houston, Trachtenberg confirmed in a Facebook post.
Immigration motivation: Some social media users claimed that Boelter shot the two lawmakers, state Rep. Melissa Hortman and state Sen. John Hoffman, because they voted to make undocumented immigrants ineligible for MinnesotaCare, a state-subsidized health insurance program. This claim was cited to argue that the lawmakers were targeted because they did not adopt the liberal position on the issue.
Actually: Only one of the two lawmakers, Hortman, voted to repeal undocumented immigrants’ eligibility for MinnesotaCare, according to Hortman and Hoffman’s voting records published on the Minnesota Legislature’s website. Sen. Hoffman voted against the repeal. There is no evidence that Boelter’s stance on healthcare for undocumented immigrants motivated the attacks.
More context: As previously reported in Reality Check, accounts by friends of Boelter, voting records, government officials, and an alleged manifesto that authorities said was found in Boelter’s vehicle are strong evidence that he was not a Democrat or liberal and based on comments made by his roommate, he may have voted for Donald Trump.
Click here to find out more about NewsGuard Trust Scores and our process for rating websites. You can download NewsGuard’s browser extension, which displays NewsGuard Trust Score icons next to links on search engines, social media feeds, and other platforms by clicking here.
3. Liberals Wrongly Claim Large Crowd at Military Parade Was AI
By Nicole Dirks
What happened: Shortly after the Department of Defense shared an image showing a large crowd at the June 14, 2025, military parade in Washington, left-leaning social media users began falsely accusing the government of using artificial intelligence to boost the appearance of the crowd size.
Context: On June 14, 2025, President Donald Trump hosted a parade along Washington’s National Mall to mark the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary, which coincided with his 79th birthday.
Trump has long been focused on crowd sizes, once falsely accusing the media of downplaying attendance at his 2017 inauguration.
A closer look: On June 15, 2025, an X account for the Pentagon posted a photo of a densely packed crowd at the parade surrounding the Washington Monument and stated, “We were honored to host HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of proud Americans at the Army’s 250th anniversary.”
Anti-Trump accounts soon claimed that the image was manipulated, possibly with AI, to make the crowd look bigger than it actually was.
Anti-Trump X user @WUTangKids posted a screenshot of the image and stated, “LMAO been waiting for them [to] post a photoshopped pic of Dear Leader’s parade crowd size and they didn’t disappoint with this gem.” The post received 2.7 million views and 45,000 likes in one day.
Liberal X user @allenanalysis stated, “BUSTED: The Pentagon just tried to gaslight America with a fake crowd photo from Trump’s military parade.” The post garnered 5 million views and 55,000 likes in one day.
Actually: The image is not AI, according to AI detection software.
NewsGuard ran the photo through AI detection tools Hive and Decopy AI, which determined there was only a 1.5 percent and 2.2 percent chance, respectively, that the image was AI-generated.
NewsGuard reviewed seven other images of the crowd surrounding the Washington Monument on June 14, captured from different angles, and found they depicted similar crowd sizes to the one shared by the Pentagon.
After the accusations about the photo surfaced, the Pentagon issued a statement on X saying, “We don’t use AI to enhance crowd size.” The Associated Press reported that as many as 200,000 people were anticipated to attend the parade, but poor weather conditions resulted in a crowd that “appeared to fall far short of early predictions.”
Introducing NewsGuard’s Iranian State-Affiliated False Claims Israel War Tracker
Hours after Israel launched attacks against Tehran’s nuclear sites and military leadership on June 13, 2025, Iranian state-controlled and affiliated media sources began to spread false claims attempting to portray Israel’s attack against the regime in Tehran as a failure and Iran’s retaliation as a success, as reported earlier this week in Reality Check.
Since then, NewsGuard’s global team of analysts has identified 16 Iranian false claims spreading across social media and has identified 51 websites advancing these myths. These claims have ranged from AI-generated images and photos purporting to show mass destruction in Tel Aviv to false claims about the supposed capturing of Israeli pilots and other personnel.
This week, NewsGuard introduced the Iranian State-Affiliated False Claims Israel War Tracker, which includes a continuously updated count of Iranian state-affiliated false claims and the number of websites spreading them, along with a sampling of the top false Iranian narratives relating to the conflict.
Access NewsGuard’s Iranian State-Affiliated Israel War False Claims Tracker here.
4. Steak and Lobster Army Meals Not Proof of Imminent Deployment to the Middle East
By Sarah Komar
What happened: Social media users suspicious of U.S. involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict are citing out-of-context videos of U.S. Army soldiers eating lavish meals to falsely claim they prove that the U.S. government is preparing for a troop deployment to Iran.