Lighthouse Journalism came across a post being widely shared on Twitter, where it was being claimed that WHO has unveiled ‘global police force to arrest citizens who post independent media, online, for those discussing the disease X. Some posts were accompanied with a screenshot of the article from ‘The People’s Voice’. After investigation, the viral claim was found to be fake. WHO has not unveiled a global police force to arrest citizens.
Disease X is a placeholder name that was adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in February 2018 on their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases to represent a hypothetical, unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic.
Claim:
X user Tracey Mackin shared the viral claim on her account.
Check the archive version of the post.
Other users too are sharing the same claim.
Investigation:
We started our investigation by checking if there are news reports about the claim doing rounds on the internet.
We did not find any credible news organisation carrying this report.
We then tracked the article online, through the screenshot that was being published and ran it through a chrome extension, ‘TrustServista’, which gives the trust level of the article published on a particular website. The trust level in this case was just ‘35%’, meaning that the article cannot be trusted.
We then reached out to the WHO spokesperson through the media inquiries section mentioned on the website of WHO.
The WHO spokesperson informed that the viral claim is false. According to WHO, the post being fact checked is referring to the discussion on disease X and pandemic preparedness by Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general at the World Economic Forum in Davos on 17th January, 2024.
According to the WHO the post is also misinterpreting the pandemic treaty that WHO member states are currently negotiating.
WHO spokesperson through mail, also shared links to gain insights on disease X.
According to the website, ‘The WHO R&D Blueprint organized a consultation to apply scientific lessons learned during the SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic and other recent outbreaks to address the research needs for unknown agents capable of future pandemics – Pathogen X‘.
Conclusion: WHO did not unveil ‘global police force’ to arrest citizens who post independent media online, the viral claim stating so is false.
