Facebook removes Trump’s ‘Covid misinformation’ post
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Fox News
A clip from President Trump’s Fox News interview was posted to his Facebook page
Facebook says it has removed a post from US President Donald Trump’s page because it contained false claims about the coronavirus.
The clip was from an interview the president gave to Fox News earlier on Wednesday in which he said children were “almost immune” to Covid-19.
Facebook said the post violated its rules around “harmful Covid misinformation”.
It is not the first time Facebook has struck content from Mr Trump’s page.
A Facebook spokesperson told US media on Wednesday evening: “This video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from COVID-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful COVID misinformation.”
What did Trump say in his TV interview?
Speaking by telephone to morning show Fox and Friends on Wednesday, Mr Trump argued it was time for all schools nationwide to reopen.
He said: “If you look at children, children are almost – and I would almost say definitely – almost immune from this disease.
“So few, they’ve got stronger, hard to believe, I don’t know how you feel about it, but they’ve got much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this.
“And they don’t have a problem, they just don’t have a problem.”
He also said of coronavirus: “This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away.”
How dangerous is coronavirus for children?
Children can catch and transmit the virus, but they run an extremely low risk of becoming ill from it.
Adults – and particularly older adults – are far more likely to be seriously ill and die from complications.
The largest study done so far, involving more than 55,000 hospital patients, found that only 0.8% were under the age of 19.
Half of all the people with confirmed coronavirus who were admitted to critical care units in England, Wales and Northern Ireland were 60 or older as of 31 July, according to a research charity.
A recent US study of coronavirus cases among 7,780 children from 26 countries found almost one in five patients had no symptoms. Another one in five developed lesions on their lungs during the infection.
Some 3.3% were admitted to intensive care units and seven deaths were reported, according to the research from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.
A study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that people under 20 were about half as susceptible to coronavirus infection as those over 20.
There have been some extremely rare cases of children developing an inflammatory syndrome similar to Kawasaki disease, and scientists are exploring a possible delayed immune response to coronavirus.
Why did Facebook last take down a Trump post?
In June, Facebook said it had removed adverts for President Trump’s re-election campaign that featured a symbol used in Nazi Germany.
The company said the offending ad contained an inverted red triangle similar to that used by the Nazis to label opponents such as communists.
Mr Trump’s campaign team said the far-left activist group antifa uses the symbol and it was a reference to them.
The ads, which were posted on the site on pages belonging to President Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence, were online for about 24 hours and had received hundreds of thousands of views before they were taken down.