Australia has approved an application to forcibly vaccinate its citizens via ‘chemtrails’.
This is based on misreporting around an application, submitted to the Australian government in 2013, to hold a clinical trial involving up to 1,000 participants in order to investigate a genetically-modified cholera vaccine. Participants took the vaccine as a drink—it had nothing to do with ‘chemtrails’.
An article shared on Facebook claims that Australia has approved an application from a “Big Pharma company” to allow its citizens to be forcibly vaccinated via ‘chemtrails’.
It claims that the Australian Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR) has granted PaxVax—a US-based biotechnology research company—a licence to release a “GMO vaccine consisting of live bacteria into Queensland, via chemtrails”, designed to protect against cholera, as part of a clinical trial.
This is largely copied from an inaccurate article published by the website preventdisease.com more than eight years ago, which now appears to have been deleted. An archived version of the page shows it was posted as early as November 2013.
It’s true that PaxVax applied to test a genetically-modified cholera vaccine in Australia in 2013. However, claims that the vaccine would be forcibly administered to the population “via chemtrails” are totally false.
Archived documents published by the OGTR show that the clinical trial would involve “up to 1,000 healthy volunteers”, and participants would be “given the vaccine as a drink”. In fact, the document specifically states that the vaccine “will not be sprayed into the air”.
The trial concluded in 2015, and the vaccine was approved for use by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2016 under the name Vaxchora.
Scientist Wilburn Chen, who worked on the development of Vaxchora, told Australian fact checkers AAP FactCheck: “I know of no plans to disperse the vaccine by air; there is no scientifically plausible reason to disperse the vaccine by air.”
As we have written a number of times before, the word ‘chemtrail’ is used to misleadingly describe white lines that appear in the sky behind planes, which proponents of the related conspiracy theory claim are being deliberately released to either poison the population or control the weather.
Rather than being deliberately filled with harmful chemicals, these white lines are actually condensation trails (often referred to as contrails)—long lines of cloud which are formed when water vapour produced at high altitudes by aeroplane engines freezes as it is released into the cold air surrounding the aeroplane.
Image courtesy of Prashanta
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because there are no plans to forcibly vaccinate Australians via ‘chemtrails’.
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