Pakistan born Canadian Twitter influencer Tarek Fatah tweeted on Wednesday a scene from a Pakistani movie showing a woman turn away health workers administering vaccines, without specifying the video was culled from a movie.
Fateh, who has large following among the right wing in India, tweeted the 42 second clip showing a woman behave rudely with a group of health workers who were on a door-to-door polio vaccine administration campaign.
Pakistani mother slams the door shut in the face of Polio workers. Screams at the two female volunteers:
— Tarek Fatah (@TarekFatah) January 14, 2020
"I will never ever allow my children to take these drops. Never never will my kids drink these drops. Never." pic.twitter.com/y9z7lIbRnr
Pakistan remains one of the three countries in the world, where polio still exists. Misinformation, fear mongering and suspicions about the polio vaccine have led to Pakistan struggling to control its spread. According to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, 2019 saw at least 136 cases reported in the country. Pakistan has seen fierce resistance to the vaccine, with routine attacks reported on health workers and hospitals during the vaccination drives.
The clip tweeted by Fateh shows an agitated woman speaking to a health worker that she will not administer polio drops to her child. She tells the health worker in a dramatic fashion in Punjabi-Hindi, "that it gives the children diarrhoea and the medicines to cure it are unaffordable." When the health worker tries to convince her, the woman asks the worker to "instead fill up groceries in her house with the money it costs to administer polio vaccine as that would help her" and then slams the door on them.
Following Fatah's tweet the video was picked up and shared on Facebook as well.
FACT CHECK
Hours after Fatah tweeted the video, Pakistani actress Mehwish Hayat replied to him saying that the video was a scene from her movie "Load Wedding".
Hayat said the polio worker in the scene was her and the women playing the role of a mother is an actress.
Thank u for giving ur 2 cents on this but pls first verify the source b4 posting next time. It's a scene frm my movie"loadwedding",the polio worker is me & that woman an actress.Through the film we were raising awareness of the issue.Glad 2 see our performances were so convincing https://t.co/ididoJJcxL
— Mehwish Hayat TI (@MehwishHayat) January 15, 2020
We then looked through the scenes from Load Wedding movie, available on YouTube and found the exact scene at the counter of 34.30 minutes.
The dialogues, setting, characters in the video tweeted by Fatah match scenes from the movie. The title credits at the end of the movie identify the actor as 'Sana Butt'. We compared stills from the movie to the video tweeted by Fateh and found several similarities.
This is not the first time, Fatah has tweeted misleading and fake posts. BOOM has previously debunked a tweet by Fatah where he shared a video of child abuse from Jammu and Kashmir falsely claiming that it was Pakistan.