“Boy passes Joe Biden a vial of fresh blood to drink on his way back to the White House”

Social media users circulated a fake, doctored video that purported to show a child discreetly handing a vial of blood off to President Joe Biden.

“Boy passes Joe Biden a vial of fresh blood to drink on his way back to the White House,” said a Dec. 16 tweet from a Twitter account that has since been suspended.

The Biden-drinks-blood claim was repeated — and the video reposted — on Instagram. There, it collected thousands of views, and it was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) 

But the claim is false, and the video it’s based on is edited to include the vial of blood.

A Dec. 16, 2021, Instagram post shared a doctored video of President Joe Biden.

The original video, unedited and without the ominous soundtrack featured in the social media version, was captured live on July 21 by a local Fox-affiliate TV station serving the Cincinnati area, Snopes reported. The video shows Biden meeting with Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and his family after landing at an airport near the Kentucky-Ohio border. 

Around the 12:30 mark, the Fox19 video shows Biden slipping an unknown object to the young boy standing beside him, Beshear’s son Will, who then placed the object in his pocket. It doesn’t show a vial of blood, nor does it show Biden receiving anything from Beshear’s son in return. 

Crystal Staley, Beshear’s communications director, said the social media claim about Beshear’s son slipping Biden a vial of blood is “completely false.”

The claim about Biden harvesting blood to drink plays into a segment of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, including many high-profile Democrats. Some QAnon adherents believe members of this ring molest, kill and eat children to ingest a life-extending chemical in human blood, PolitiFact reported.

Those beliefs are without evidence, and so is this claim.

We rate it Pants on Fire!