DISINFO: US Mayor admitted having COVID-19 in November

DISINFORMATION CASE DETAILS

DISINFO: US Mayor admitted having COVID-19 in November

SUMMARY

The mayor of an American city admitted to being infected with the coronavirus last November after his virus antibody test turned out to be positive. That was last November, two months before the first infection in China.

RESPONSE

Recurring misinformation related to the 2019-nCoV coronavirus. New Jersey’s Belleville Mayor Michael Melham believes he caught the novel coronavirus in November, he claimed he caught the virus at a convention, but his doctor back then had diagnosed him with a bad case of the flu. He didn’t have a proper COVID-19 test, but a blood test revealed he had Coronavirus antibodies that suggest but do not confirm that he had a type of coronavirus, which shouldn't necessarily be the COVID-19 virus. Moreover, the majority of antibody tests in the US market have yet to be approved by the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and doctors have warned those taking them to proceed with caution and take the results with a grain of salt. Further, the UK’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock said that no G7 country has yet developed an antibody test that could say with certainty whether a person who recovered from coronavirus was immune. EUvsDisinfo database has a long set of disinformation cases on coronavirus, such as claims that Bill Gates and George Soros are sponsoring the Wuhan coronavirus, that it is a UK, US or NATO creation and Americans have its cure, that it is an artificial disease which specifically targets Chinese DNA, that it is a pretext to gain control of the world’s population, that it was created with economic goals while big pharma companies are spreading panic for their own profits, that it is a biological weapon against Russia and China, that it will wipe out Ukraine’s population in a few days or that it was predicted by Nostradamus and others.

Disclaimer

Cases in the EUvsDisinfo database focus on messages in the international information space that are identified as providing a partial, distorted, or false depiction of reality and spread key pro-Kremlin messages. This does not necessarily imply, however, that a given outlet is linked to the Kremlin or editorially pro-Kremlin, or that it has intentionally sought to disinform. EUvsDisinfo publications do not represent an official EU position, as the information and opinions expressed are based on media reporting and analysis of the East Stratcom Task Force.

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