Fact check: Donald Trump shooting misinformation and GP patient numbers
Round up of fact checks from the last week compiled by Full Fact.
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Your support makes all the difference.This roundup of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s largest fact checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information.
Donald Trump assassination attempt
In the days following the attempted assassination of former president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, we’ve seen several false claims spreading online about the event and its aftermath.
Two photos, apparently showing the former president and secret service agents around him smiling just after the shooting, have been shared on social media. One image showed three agents smiling as they surround Mr Trump, while another features him smiling with a hand raised and his injured ear visible.
However, these images have been digitally altered. The original photos, taken by an Associated Press photographer, do not show the secret service agents or Mr Trump smiling.
The FBI has named Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, as the “subject involved” in the assassination attempt. Despite this, posts being shared online misidentified an Italian sports journalist as the shooter responsible.
Some users online wrongly named the attacker as ‘Mark Violets’ and included an image of a man in sunglasses. But the man pictured had no involvement in the attack on the former president—he is actually an Italian sports journalist called Marco Violi. After being falsely linked to the shooting, Mr Violi posted a statement on Instagram saying: “I categorically deny that I am involved in this situation.”
Others claimed online that Donald Trump had been photographed playing golf after being injured in the assassination attempt. The image being shared showed the former president in his trademark red “Make America Great Again” cap, swinging a golf club over his shoulder with a small white bandage covering the top part of his ear.
But this picture is not genuine—the original was taken during a golf tournament in Miami in October 2022 and the bandage appears to have been digitally added.
GP patient list hasn’t increased by 6.4 million since 2019
In a letter to the new health secretary Wes Streeting, the chair of the BMA’s GP committee claimed that patient numbers in England had “increased by 6.4 million in the past 5 years alone”.
But this isn’t right, and the patient register has only grown by about half that. As of June 2024 (when the letter from the BMA was written), there were 63,375,801 registered patients at GP practices in England, up by 3.5 million on the 59,855,056 in June 2019.
These numbers should be taken with a degree of caution, not least because the GP patient list size seems to have grown larger than the total population of England (which is estimated to be 60.9 million).
After Full Fact raised this with the BMA, it acknowledged this was an error, and that the increase of 6.4 million is correct when viewed over the last nine years, rather than five. The BMA told us it would correct its letter and re-submit it to the health secretary.