Social media users share screenshots of an alleged tweet by dr. Rachel Levine, secretary of health for the State of Pennsylvania, and U.S. President Joe Biden, a new assistant health secretary, say she was honored to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair in March. This screenshot was digitally altered while Levine did not tweet anything like that.
Examples can be seen here and here.
The alleged tweet reads: “Thank you Vanity Fair for honoring me on the cover of your magazine in March. My dream of one day becoming @POTUS just took a step forward. ”
Levine, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at Penn State College of Medicine (here), who led Pennsylvania’s response to the coronavirus outbreak as the Commonwealth’s top health official, was named by President Biden as assistant health secretary for the new government, and becomes the first openly transgender official confirmed by the Senate (here).
The tweet contains a photo of the magazine with Levine on the cover.
The Twitter account shown on the screenshot (@DrRachelLevine) has been suspended by Twitter twitter.com/DrRachelLevine . Levine’s official account can be seen twitter.com/SecretaryLevine . There is no such tweet.
Vanity Fair has all editions available on the archive.vanityfair.com/ website. Singer-songwriter Billie Eilish in the March 2021 issue here on the cover. On January 15, Vanity Fair tweeted (here) that Eilish would be on the cover.
Levine addressed the ridicule and often transphobic misinformation directed at her in the past (here, here).
VERDICT
Untrue. Dr. Rachel Levine does not appear on the cover of the March 2021 Vanity Fair issue.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.