The Trump candidate in California's recall election Larry Elder, a Republican running for governor of California, told one of the state's newspapers a little more than a month ago that President Biden won the 2020 election "fair and square." His clarity wouldn't last. California is holding a recall election on Tuesday to decide whether to keep Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). Elder is the GOP front-runner in the race, should voters give Newsom the boot. A longtime talk-radio host, Elder solidified Republican support by copy-catting former president Donald Trump — and he is racking up Pinocchios just like Trump in interviews and campaign stops. After saying Biden had won "fair and square," the GOP candidate went on the radio and asked for a "mulligan." Then he started tweeting about election "shenanigans" in 2020. By the time he appeared on Fox News on Labor Day weekend, the flip-flop was complete. Elder said Biden did not win "fairly and squarely" and rattled off a vague, Trumpian list of falsehoods about Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Hunter Biden, Big Tech "censorship," the works. In the same Fox News interview, Elder went on and on about how children are "not likely" to catch the coronavirus, get seriously infected, get hospitalized or die from the disease, so they shouldn't be compelled to get a vaccine. This, despite 5 million infections of people under 18, a sharp rise in hospitalizations due to child cases of covid this summer, more than 500 deaths among this age group, and the CDC reporting that "hospitalization rates were approximately 10 times higher in unvaccinated compared with fully vaccinated adolescents." Our fact-check of Elder also tackles his denialism of climate change playing a large role in California's intensifying wildfires, and erroneous statements he made about California's economy and population. He earned the full Four Pinocchios. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. Can Biden use an old law to lower drug prices? Democrats including Sens. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Rep. Lloyd Doggett (Tex.) say the federal government could invoke an arcane section of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 to lower drug prices. They wrote in a letter to Biden's health secretary that the administration "should consider using march-in rights when drugs face limited competition or market practices have failed to ensure an affordable price." But there's a hitch. No Democratic or Republican administration has accepted this view, no court has declared it legal, and the law's sponsors say the provision in question is being twisted. Bayh-Dole originally was aimed at allowing universities and small companies to profit from government-funded research that might have commercial value. After its passage, hundreds of successful products emerged, ranging from Honeycrisp apples (University of Minnesota) to Google (Stanford University). Universities earn millions of dollars a year from royalties on patents they license to private companies. A lesser-known provision of the law gives the federal government, under certain conditions, the power to "march in" and license patent rights to another manufacturer. Some lawyers, health care experts and lawmakers believe this is an unused tool to lower the cost of expensive drugs originally created with federal funds. This legal theory emerged from a Tulane Law Review article published in 2001, and has since gained many adherents as drug prices rise without congressional action. But it remains a theory, since no government authority has adopted it as the law of the land. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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