Astroworld wrongly blamed on vaccine

The claim:

“What happened at the Travis Scott concert? … As others have said, this is a test run on the vaxxed.” — Facebook post

Investigators are still looking into what caused the crowd surge at Houston’s Astroworld music festival that killed eight people and injured dozens more during a performance by rapper Travis Scott.

Some people on social media claim to have an explanation: the COVID-19 vaccines. The post goes on to say that a material called graphene oxide can “destroy consciousness” and control people through magnetic frequencies, which includes music.

PolitiFact rating: False. The vaccines don’t contain graphene oxide, which has an array of biomedical uses and can be toxic in certain applications.

Discussion

The post was flagged as part of Face-book’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed.

PolitiFact previously fact-checked a claim that falsely said graphene oxide — a material made by the oxidation of graphite — was used in Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. A company spokesperson told us that the material is used in some vaccines, but none by Pfizer.

None of the listed ingredients is another name for graphene oxide, and the material doesn’t appear in ingredient lists for the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines.

Ron Mertens, founder and CEO of Graphene-Info.com, a graphene news website, said graphene oxide is “not magnetic and not a conductive material, so it cannot be used in the ways people suggest in such videos.”

Full Fact, a fact-checking organization in the United Kingdom, reported that the rumors about graphene oxide in vaccines appear to have originated with a Spanish study from June. The report claimed that, using a microscopic technique, a solution created from a vial of Pfizer’s vaccine was observed to be similar in form to graphene oxide.

But the study hasn’t been published in a journal or peer-reviewed, and it offers no conclusive evidence. It’s not even clear that the vial being tested contained a legitimate vaccine sample. Fact-checkers at Health Feedback reported that the person who sent the vial to the researcher has been known to spread anti-vaccine content.