Video shows cows sickened by chemical in plants, not COVID vaccines
CLAIM: Video shows cows at a farm in Italy that were killed by COVID-19 vaccines.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The video shows cows that weresickened and died from consuming plants that contained high concentrations of a naturally occurring chemical that becomes toxic in drought conditions, according to a veterinarian who investigated the matter. The plant produced the dangerous chemical as the result of a drought.
THE FACTS: The nearly two-minute video clip circulating on social media is from 2022 and is unrelated to vaccines.
“WARNING Graphic Footage Northern Italy,” reads one widely shared tweet also shared on Instagram. “Government came and vaccinated cattle against cv19 Look at the result all dead or dying the next day.”
The tweet included a hashtag for a baseless conspiracy theory about COVID-19 vaccines and shows a video clip of cows, evidently sick, lying on their sides at a farm.
But the cows in the video weren’t given COVID-19 vaccines, said Stefano Giantin, a veterinarian based in the northwest Italian province of Cuneo who works for a local office of the country’s national veterinary service.
Giantin told The Associated Press in an interview that the video shows a 2022 incident in which about 50 cows died on a farm in Sommariva del Bosco, Cuneo. The episode generated news coverage at the time.
The cows were poisoned by cultivated sorghum, Giantin said, explaining that the plant is normally not lethal but a drought at the time caused the plant to develop “very strong concentrations” of prussic acid, or cyanide.
Conditions such as a freeze or severe drought are known to cause the production of prussic acid in sorghum and other plants.
In the case of the Sommariva farm, about 40 cows at the farm were successfully saved with an antidote, Giantin said.
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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.