Every U.S. election year has a disease outbreak.
"Does every U.S. election year have a disease associated with it? No, thats not true: A whiteboard photograph being shared online contains some inaccurate dates and information. It presents a U.S.-centric view of global epidemics and pandemics to suggest a conspiracy to influence election outcomes, but the facts dont match the argument.", The claim originated from a post (archived here) published by Kristin Flor on March 9, 2020, under the title "Posted at a Doctors office today." It opened:, Every election year has a disease, SARS - 2004AVIAN - 2008SWINE - 2010MERS - 2012EBOLA - 2014ZIKA - 2016EBOLA - 2018CORONA - 2020, Users on social media only saw this:, , The post presented a timeline of global outbreaks and tied them to corresponding election years in the United States. The problem with this approach is that most of the pandemics and epidemics originated outside North America. In some cases, the U.S. was not largely impacted by the disease outbreaks., The timeline on the image being circulated contains a lot of inaccurate information. Lead Stories has previously debunked information presented on the right side of the image, which claimed that the novel coronavirus spread was leveling off. The opposite is true. More than 114,000 cases have been reported around the world in at least 103 countries, according to The New York Times. More than 4,000 people have died, most of them in mainland China. To suggest this is an election-year conspiracy in the United States ignores the global scale of the outbreak., The World Health Organization created a timeline of major infectious threats in the 21st century, which shows that the dates associated with some of the diseases do not neatly conform to those listed on the photo., , Here are the actual dates associated with each of the named diseases:, The actual timeline of these outbreaks and infectious threats does not precisely match up with the whiteboard photo being shared online. There is no reason to suggest these global health issues have any relation to U.S. elections., See who is sharing it (it might even be your friends...) and leave the link in the comments.:, Lead Stories is working with the CoronaVirusFacts/DatosCoronaVirus Alliance, a coalition of more than 100 fact-checkers who are fighting misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn more about the alliance here., "Ryan Cooper, a staff writer and fact-checker for Lead Stories, is the former Director of Programming at CNN International, where he helped shape the networks daily newscasts broadcast to more than 280 million households around the world. He was based at the networks Los Angeles Bureau. There, he managed the team responsible for a three-hour nightly program,\xa0Newsroom LA.", "Formerly, he worked at the headquarters in Atlanta, and he spent four years at the London bureau. An award-winning producer, Cooper oversaw the networks Emmy Award-winning coverage of the uprising in Egypt in 2011. He also served as a supervising producer during much of the networks live reporting on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in 2006, for which CNN received an Edward R. Murrow Award.", Note: if reading this fact check makes you want to contact us to complain about bias, please check out our Red feed and Blue feed first., Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, deceptive or\n      inaccurate stories (or media) making the rounds on the internet.\n      \n      Spotted something? Let us know!., Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, deceptive or\n        inaccurate stories (or media) making the rounds on the internet.\n        \n        Spotted something? Let us know!.
Fact Check: Every U.S. Election Year Does NOT Have A Disease | Lead Stories