Advertisement

Fact check: Hoax post impersonating Mayo Clinic physician continues to circulate

The claim: Mayo Clinic staff member misdiagnosed pregnancies of Trump supporters

Recently, some social media users have been outraged to read a post in which a Twitter user purporting to be a doctor claims to be tricking supporters of former president Donald Trump into terminating healthy pregnancies.

"When Trump supporters come to my office at the Mayo Clinic, I love misdiagnosing their healthy pregnancies as ectopic so they have to abort their white fetuses," the tweet reads.

A screenshot of the tweet appeared in a June 14 Instagram post posted by conservative outreach group Young America's Foundation. The screenshot also included a tweet from another anonymous social media poster claiming to be a doctor who gives Trump supporters vitamins instead of antibiotics. More than 11,000 users liked the post in less than 24 hours, and other versions on Facebook and Twitter accumulated hundreds more interactions.

"Sickening," Young Americans captioned the image in their post. "What has the world come to when doctors are misdiagnosing patients intentionally because of their ideological views?"

But this is a hoax, and an old one at that.

The screenshot with the two tweets was posted in June 2018, according to WUSA 9 Verify and the Associated Press. And there is no reason to believe the tweets are evidence of medical malpractice against Trump supporters, as other independent fact-checking outlets have also found.

The claim about the Mayo Clinic came from a parody account, web archives show. The social media poster also has no affiliation with the Mayo Clinic, according to a clinic spokesperson.

The second poster provided no evidence for the claims and appeared to be a parody as well.

USA TODAY reached out to social media posters who shared the screenshot for comment.

Follow us on Facebook! Like our page to get updates throughout the day on our latest debunks

No evidence tweets came from real doctors

The Twitter user who claimed to be a Mayo Clinic employee, @drnifkin, is not one, a spokesperson for the medical group told USA TODAY. It is also a parody account.

"A parody account created the message in 2018," Mayo Clinic spokesperson Ginger Plumbo wrote in an email. "This is not an actual Mayo Clinic staff member."

The Mayo Clinic first issued a statement about the tweet in 2018 and continues to respond to new iterations of the claim, which resurface several times a year, according to Plumbo.

The account described itself on its profile as an "obstetrician at the world renowned Mayo Clinic parody," web archives from June 2018 show. The account is now suspended for violating Twitter rules.

The user who wrote the other tweet included in the viral screenshot also seems to be a "troll" or parody account. They used the name "Diana Thirst" and described themself as a "vile grave dancer" rather than a doctor in their bio, an archive of the profile shows. Their claim also has a satirical tone, such as in the detail that "I prescribe weed to myself then laugh" after supposedly giving vitamins to Trump supporters. The account is now suspended.

Neither account provided any evidence to support its claims.

Fact check:Fabricated story about Uvalde shooting and gun control went viral

Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that a Mayo Clinic staff member misdiagnosed pregnancies of Trump supporters. A spokesperson for the Mayo Clinic told USA TODAY that the account that tweeted the claim has no affiliation with the clinic. The account labeled itself as parody and provided no evidence for its claims.

Our fact-check sources:

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Post claiming to misdiagnose Trump supporters is a hoax