THE REQUEST: A video shows the moment in which a minor hands Joe Biden, president of the United States, a vial of blood to drink.
VERIFY AP: False. The registration is tampered with.
THE FACTS: Several Twitter posts falsely claim that a video shows a child handing the president of the United States a vial of blood.
“A boy hands Joe Biden a vial of blood to drink on his way back to the White House,” reads a tweet that includes a 22-second recording showing a minor dressed in blue handing the president what appears to be a red test tube.
However, after doing a reverse image search, the Associated Press found that the recording is doctored and that in the original Biden is handing an object to the child and not the other way around. The object that the agent gives to the minor is not a red bottle, in fact the latter was added later.
The video was taken from a live broadcast captured on the Fox 19 network on July 21, 2021. The footage shows Biden meeting with Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear and his family at an airport near the Kentucky-US Ohio border.
It is from 12:39 of this recording when Biden is seen taking Will, son of the governor of Kentucky, by the hand to slip an object into his hand while saying a few words to him. From his mother’s side, Britainy Beshear, who smiles at the president after handing the object to the minor.
Will is later seen examining the item and putting it in his pocket. But the recording does not show the test tube with the alleged blood that appears in the video that has gone viral. Nor is Biden shown receiving anything from Beshear’s son, in fact the recording shared on the networks is played backwards, which makes it appear that the child handed something to the president, but this is not real.
A theory promoted by conspiracy group QAnon claims that celebrities traffic in children to harvest adrenaline from their blood and create a drug. For the proponents of that claim, many high-profile Democrats are in that business.
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This article is part of the Associated Press’s fact-checking effort to combat misinformation being shared online and includes a partnership with Facebook to identify and reduce the spread of fake news circulating on this social network.
Here you will find more information about Facebook’s fact checking program: https://www.facebook.com/help/1952307158131536
