Facts Matter: Kinzinger said Trump won, but he didn't mean the 2020 election
U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Channahon, serves on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol building and voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump in 2021. But a recent Facebook post suggests the representative has had a change of heart.
"Kinzinger admits Trump won," reads the post, which includes a video.
But that's not quite what Kinzinger said in the video, according to PolitiFact. The comment was about a personal feud with Trump, not the presidential election.
The clip is taken from a recent WGN-TV interview with Kinzinger, who is not running for reelection. He was asked if the former president won the "Trump vs. Kinzinger war."
"Yes, yeah, he won," Kinzinger replied. "In the short term at least. There's no use in pretending somehow I scored some major victory and saved the party."
During a June interview on CBS, Kinzinger said he believed Trump knew he lost the 2020 election.
WHO chief is vaccinated
Recent social media posts claim World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is not vaccinated against COVID-19.
"Tedros not jabbed?" Well who'd have thought?" read one tweet that included a video.
But the claim is wrong, according to The Associated Press. Ghebreyesus is vaccinated and the comment in the clip is taken out of context.
The portion of the video clip, taken from an interview by writer Jon Cohen, shows Cohen asking Ghebreyesus if he is vaccinated.
The clip then cuts to Ghebreyesus saying he "wanted to wait until Africa and other countries, in other regions, low-income countries, start vaccination."
But in the full version of the interview, Ghebreyesus answered that he was vaccinated on June 12, 2021.
Later in the interview, he explains that he did wait as a protest against the barrier low-income countries faced in receiving the vaccines.
Cohen told the AP claims Ghebreyesus wasn't vaccinated are "highly absurd."
"I don't think anyone who actually watched the documentary could come to the conclusion that those excerpts are creating," he said.
Replenishing oil takes millennia
Some social media posts claim oil is quickly forming in the earth, replenishing the supply as fast as it is being extracted. "(Oil) regenerates within the Earth faster than it could ever be depleted," read a recent, seemingly assuring, Facebook post.
But that claim is false, according to USA Today. Oil, which develops when the remains of living organisms are compressed and heated under layers of sediment, takes millions of years to form.
Humans extracted nearly 32.8 billion barrels of oil from the Earth in 2021. Experts estimate that it takes 2,500 metric tons of organic material, the remains of living organisms, to form just one barrel of oil.
"It won't replenish in a human lifetime," University of Manchester professor Jonathan Redfern told USA Today. "Many (oil) fields - in the USA - have been depleted for decades. They haven't refilled."
• Bob Oswald, boboswald33@gmail.com, is a veteran area journalist and former news editor of the Elgin Courier-News.