Snopes
In July 2024, Snopes introduced "FactBot," an "artificial intelligence (AI) tool to fact-check your burning questions about online rumors."
In 2021, we wrote about an example of Snopes attempting to fact-check a subjective claim about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Type of Content
Approved Story
1
Format
Region
News Item Format
Standard
Image Caption
Gage Skidmore
Claim: National Institutes of Health Director Anthony Fauci helped fund gain of function research at a facility in Wuhan, China, and that research ultimately led to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rating: Unproven
Context: The claim that Fauci is "responsible" for the COVID-19 pandemic is based, in turn, on speculation that NIH-funded gain of function research resulted in a manipulated form of the coronavirus "spilling over" from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and infecting the human population. n October 2021, the congressional group U.S. House Oversight Committee revealed that a grantee of NIH funding failed to report the outcomes of an experiment involving coronaviruses infection in mouse models, prompting a secondary review by the federal agency. The NIH demanded researchers submit further documentation by the end of October. Until that information is made publicly available, we rate this claim as “Unproven”