USA President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump had tested positive for COVID19 in early October. However, they returned to the White House after having spent only a handful of days at the military hospital. The images of President Trump staging a dramatic return and appearing without a facemask went also went viral. Thus, there were many posts on social media on Donald Trump.

However, when we fact checked such posts, we found two fake statements attributed to President Trump. One was about Trump taking Russian vaccine and the other was the President boasting his miraculous healing powers. Let’s check out these two fake claims and find out their truth.

Claim Details:

A Facebook page named Chamith Kumarage alongside a number of other Facebook users had posted a screenshot of a Twitter message, purported to be from US President Donald Trump’s account along with the following message.

“I just got the vaccine shot for Covid-19 at the White House. The vaccine is the one was created in Russia. I received the shot at 8 am and I wanted to let you all know that it’s completely safe with no side effects whatsoever and that feels ……” The last part of the message comprised of letters, which seemed like Russian.

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Another claim involving President Trump, which read as “The doctors said that they’ve never seen a body killing Coronovirus like my body. They tested my DNA and it wasn’t DNA. It was USA.” was also shared among numerous social media users.

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Fact Check

We scanned the Twitter account of President Trump and news reports in early October and did not come across any report of Tweet stating that President Trump was administered a Covid-19 vaccine of Russian origin.

In addition, we observed few grammatical errors in the viral message as well. We tried to translate the last line of the message, written in Belarusian script, which only yielded meaningless words.

Purported Twitter message of President Trump, which had gone viral, was dated 2nd October 2020, the same day both of them were reported positive for COVID19. President Trump had Tweeted the news that he and First Lady Melania had tested positive for Covid-19 and that they will begin the quarantine and recovery process immediately on October 2 as seen below

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Hence it was evident that the purported message was probably edited using the screenshot of the above Tweet. A number of fact checks done globally by various organizations concluded the viral message to be false as well, as the hoax was spread across the globe.

Furthermore, as per this CNBC report President Trump had remarked, “We don’t know much about it. We hope it works, we do, we hope it works,” about the Russian ‘Sputnik V’ vaccine back in August.

The second post about President Trump had been created to give the impression that the statement “The doctors said that they’ve never seen a body killing Coronovirus like my body. They tested my DNA and it wasn’t DNA. It was USA.” was made during one of his press conferences.

We searched the press briefings given by the US president and came across the video post pertaining to the satirical viral message as below

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The video published on October 4th, while President Trump was still undergoing treatment, had a positive and thankful message for all those who were concerned about him. President Trump had thanked the doctors who were treating him, as well as health care workers and his well-wishers etc., had mentioned about his and First Lady’s health, and encouraged everyone to stay positive.

Here is an extensive fact check done by Factcrescendo India on the same claim

Conclusion

Our fact checked revealed that President Trump had neither Tweeted about a Russian vaccine for Covid-19 nor had given a statement praising his body’s tremendous ability to kill the novel coronavirus.

Therefore, we conclude that the claims made in these social media posts in the name of the US President are false and baseless.

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Title:Viral fake statements about COVID-19 attributed to US President Donald

Fact Check By: Sathyajith Subasinghe

Result: False

Rauff HakeemM. A. Sumanthiransudar oliHorse