Claim: Video and audio have surfaced about students fleeing for the fear of the COVID-19 Vaccine in Lagos.
The video is 2 years old and is linked to an incident in Port-Harcourt when a secondary school student detonated tear-gas. It has nothing to do with COVID-19.
Full Text
On Wednesday, 3rd February 2021, a short video surfaced online, accompanied by a voice note. The video showed a pandemonium; students running out of their classrooms, jumping from the storey building and fleeing the school premises. The voice behind the camera was only screaming “Jesus” in the 28seconds-long video.
The video was accompanied by a voice note in Hausa. The voice note claimed that the students are running for the fear of being injected with the COVID19 Vaccine.
“They are running because the COVID19 Vaccine injection is to be tested on them,” he said, before continuing that “The Britons who created the COVID19 Vaccine tested it on 1,000 people, 600 died. So they decided to test it on Black people, that’s why they are in Lagos,” he said.
With WhatsApp being a private platform, it is impossible to get the number of views or reach the video and voice note have attained. However, a forwarded label created by WhatsApp was stamped on the video and audio, which showed that the sender himself did not create it. He/she received it and forwarded it.
With WhatsApp widely regarded as the ‘abode of fake news’, this message has the potential of already spreading farther than we can imagine.
Verification
A Quick Search using InVid Verification tool, pointed us to the full Video on YouTube, posted on May 27th, 2019 and Facebook posted on May 25th, 2019.
Both Videos, 1:43seconds-long and 1:00minutes-long on YouTube and Facebook respectively, have the same caption, albeit constructed in different ways. The captions revealed that a secondary school student brought tear-gas to school, which was detonated, causing the pandemonium.
“An SS2 boy in Port Harcourt brought a teargas gun and dynamite to fight SS3 students” the caption on YouTube states, while the one posted on Facebook reads “An SS2 student of CSS secondary sch. Oroworokwu, port Harcourt, on the 24th of May, brought guns and grenade teargas for a class fight between SS2 students and SS3 students. Why showing it off to his classmates, he unknowingly detonated one of the grenade teargas, And all Hell broke loose!!”
Another search of the school where the incident was said to have happened, ‘CSS Secondary School, Oroworokwu, Port Harcourt, River State’, also pointed to several media reports, confirming the incident.
On the 25th May, 2019, PMNews posted the same video on its website with the headline, ‘Incredible video: Pandemonium in Rivers School as student detonates teargas in class’.
The story was also featured on the Leadership newspaper here, and on the BBC Pidgin, here.
A few days later, Rivers State Government launched a probe into the matter, as reported by the Leadership Newspaper.
COVID-19 Vaccine
Several criticisms and conspiracy theories have trailed the announcement of the development of the COVID19 Vaccine in various countries, and especially when the Nigerian Government disclosed plans to get and vaccinate Nigerians.
At the onset of the COVID-19’s spread, there were conspiracy theories linking the virus to the 5G Technology, a claim severally debunked.
Conclusion
False. The Claim that the students are running from the fear of being injected with a COVID-19 Vaccine is false. The said Video is two years old, and it’s a video depicting a tear-gas detonation in May, 2019, in Port-Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria.
The researcher produced this fact-check per the Dubawa 2020 Fellowship partnership with Vision FM to facilitate the ethos of “truth” in journalism and enhance media literacy in the country.
