CheckMate is a weekly newsletter from RMIT FactLab which recaps the latest in the world of fact checking and misinformation, drawing on the work of FactLab and its sister organisation, RMIT ABC Fact Check.
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CheckMate August 5, 2022
This week, we examined a claim by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton that the soon-to-be-axed cashless debit card was well received by trial participants and led to a significant drop in gambling.
We also investigate whether the global outbreak of monkeypox means the virus has become “airborne”, and debunk claims that COVID-19 vaccinations are weakening our immune systems and driving higher reinfection rates.
Peter Dutton hailed the ‘success’ of the cashless debit card. But how successful was it?
As Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government gets to work on delivering its election promises, legislation to scrap the cashless debit card (CDC) program is set to become one of the first bills debated by the new parliament.
The Coalition, however, says it still “strongly supports” the program, which quarantines 50-80 per cent of a welfare recipient’s payments (depending on jurisdiction and circumstance) on a card that cannot be used on drugs, alcohol or gambling.
“Research from the University of Adelaide showed that the cashless debit card led to a 21 per cent decrease in gambling and 45 per cent of people believed it had improved their lives,” Opposition Leader Peter Dutton told parliament last week.
But that’s not quite what the research says.
The January 2021 report referenced by Mr Dutton was commissioned by the former Coalition government and involved a survey of CDC participants across the program’s first three trial sites.
Despite his claim that 45 per cent of participants “believed [the card] had improved their lives”, the report found just 15 per cent said it had made life “better”, while 17 per cent reported no difference.
Meanwhile, 56 per cent of those surveyed said the program had made life “worse.”
More broadly, only 21 per cent of those surveyed said the CDC had made a “positive difference” on quality of life for themselves, their family, friends and wider community.
As for gambling, the report “found some evidence of reductions … as a direct outcome of the CDC” — though it does not state gambling was reduced by 21 per cent, as Mr Dutton claimed.
According to the report, 14.4 per cent of participants gambled in the 12 months prior to the introduction to the CDC while 11 per cent were still gambling post-introduction.
The authors noted, however, that “most of the reported change since the introduction of the CDC came from the ‘once a month or less’ very low frequency gambling category, who reported that they typically shifted from ‘gambling very infrequently’ to ‘not gamble at all’.”
“We believe the numbers on reported gambling activity lack in statistical significance, probably due to under-reporting by those who gamble more regularly,” the researchers explained.
Mr Dutton’s figure of 21 per cent appears to relate to the report’s findings on the perceived impact of the cashless debit card on gambling among trial participants.
Asked whether the rollout of the CDC had helped “with reducing gambling problems” — for themselves personally, their family, their friends or where they lived — 21 per cent of survey participants said it had made a positive difference.
Of those, 35 per cent said the difference was for themselves personally, a figure that equates to 7 per cent of participants overall.
Monkeypox is spreading, but is it airborne?
As the global monkeypox outbreak gathers pace, a number of popular social media posts have variously asserted that the virus is, or is not, “airborne”.
Adding to the confusion, last week the World Health Organisation’s African office tweeted — then deleted — to video that claimed “monkeypox is not airborne.”
So, what does the evidence say?
The WHO defines airborne transmission as “the spread of an infectious agent caused by the dissemination of droplet nuclei that remain infectious when suspended in air over long distances and time”.
Such viruses may have a preference for airborne transmission but still spread through other means.
Importantly, there is a distinction — much debated during the COVID-19 pandemic — between smaller droplets (aerosols) that remain in the air and larger respiratory droplets (spray) that fall to the ground quickly.
According to the Department of Health, monkeypox spreads through close contact with lesions (rashes, blisters or sores), contaminated objects and also bodily fluids, including respiratory droplets.
“Transmission through respiratory droplets (for example, coughing or sneezing) is less common and usually only happens if there is prolonged face-to-face contact,” its website explains.
Notably, one preprint study being shared online has found that some air samples — taken from isolation rooms for monkeypox patients in the UK — contained low levels of “replication competent” virus able to grow in a cell culture.
That, however, is not necessarily something to worry about — or at least not outside of healthcare settings where, for example, changing the sheets may send particles into the air.
A virologist at the Australian National University who studies poxviruses, David Tscharke, told CheckMate: “Just because you can show the virus is in the air, it doesn’t magically mean that you can be infected, because every different virus requires a different amount to be in the air for you to be able to catch it.”
He added: “We actually don’t know what that amount is [for monkeypox]but the shape of the epidemic suggests that there needs to be quite a lot.”
That’s because the current epidemic had so far been largely confined to men who have sex with men, Professor Tscharke explained.
“If the virus was transmissible via aerosols in a way that SARS-CoV-2 [the virus that causes COVID-19] is transmitted, the epidemic would have to be bigger right now. And it would have to have moved out of that community,” he said.
“By walking past somebody who has this, or being in the same space, it probably means you’re not going to get it.”
Professor Tscharke noted that while some older studies certainly suggested aerosol spread was possible, it is “not considered to be a major route”, and the evidence in the latest outbreak so far suggests it is “unlikely” that this has changed.
Also, Christopher Fairley, a professor of public health with Monash University, told CheckMate there was a difference between airborne particles and airborne transmission, and that monkeypox was “not an easy virus to spread.”
He said the UK study’s finding of monkeypox DNA on surfaces was important but “not something that translates into transmission”, noting that “if” airborne transmission was occurring in the current outbreak “it must be very rare”.
“The very low rate of transmission in household contacts and virtual absence of transmission to health care workers is strong evidence of this.”
Indeed, a 16-country study during the current outbreak (April-June) found that 98 per cent of cases were gay or bisexual men, with 95 per cent of transmission suspected to have occurred through sexual activity.
This fact, coupled with news that a number of children have contracted the disease, has led to stigmatisation, exacerbated by misinformation that wrongly suggests sexual activity is the only way the virus spreads.
No, COVID-19 reinfections are not increasing due to rising vaccinations
Infectious disease experts have shot down claims spreading online that repeated COVID-19 vaccinations have led to weaker immune systems and higher rates of reinfections.
“The more covid 💉 the worse the reinfection rate seems to be. Is that what you see?” one post reads.
Another says: “The more shots, the sicker the people get because of lower immune systems. The more injections, the more infections and transmissions.”
But as RMIT FactLab recently found, those claims are false.
According to experts, there was no correlation between COVID-19 vaccinations and reinfections.
Infectious disease physician Paul Griffin, an associate professor at the University of Queensland, explained to FactLab that there was “no reduction in the immune system by being vaccinated.”
“The attempt of vaccination is to train or prime the immune system to be able to respond more quickly and more effectively against the virus without the risk of having the disease itself.
“[The reinfection rate is] largely driven by the new [Omicron] subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 that are not only more infectious, but evade protection from past infection and to a degree from vaccination,” Professor Griffin said.
Epidemiologist Catherine Bennett, of the Institute for Health Transformation at Deakin University, also dismissed the claim, saying: “[There is] no basis to this bizarre link being made.”
Edited by Ellen McCutchan and David Campbell
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