Rumors on social media claim that the Vice President of pharmaceutical company Pfizer, Rady Johnson, has been arrested by law enforcement following claims of fraud regarding the side effects of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine.
An example of such a post on social media can be seen below.
VP of Pfizer arrested after document dump
The rumors started after an article published on the Vancouver Times website was circulating prolifically on Twitter claiming that Rady Johnson had been arrested and charged with multiple accounts of fraud by federal agents.
The problem, as is often the case, is that Vancouver Times does not publish genuine news by its own omission. The label Satire can be seen in small print on the article itself, and there is a full disclaimer on a separate page.
Vancouver Times is the most trusted source for satire on the West Coast. We write satirical stories about issues that affect conservatives.
Despite these disclaimers, the article has also been republished on a number of other low-quality aggregator and hyper-partisan websites without such disclaimers, helping fuel the misinformation spread online.
Vancouver Times is one of a number of websites that publish spoof news articles designed to appeal to conspiracy theorists and trigger emotional responses, and lazily justifies those articles with the label of “satire” or “entertainment”.
Of course such labels are often missed by those willing to share the articles and they are – more often than not – shared as genuine across social media.
Given the source of this information, and that no such arrest has been reported by reputable sources or by any law enforcement agencies, we rank this claim as false.
