An old photo of a young boy in a Turkish family potrait has gone viral falsely claiming he is Dr Ugur Sahin, the CEO of Germany-based company, BioNTech SE, who developed the COVID-19 vaccine along with Pfizer.
This is being shared in the backdrop of the United Kingdom approving the use of Pfizer-BioNTech's mRNA vaccine COVID-19 vaccine.
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The viral photo is being shared with the caption, "This is an immigrant family, newly arrived in Germany. The boy in the yellow shirt will go on to invent the COVID vaccine."
Click here to view, and here for an archive.
Click here to view, and here for an archive.
Viral on Facebook
On searching with the same caption on Facebook, we found that the viral photo is being shared with the false claim.
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FACT-CHECK
BOOM found the boy standing in the photo is not Dr Ugur Sahin, the CEO of Germany-based company, BioNTech SE who has been misidentified.
A reverse image search on the photo showed results on several art websites. We found that the same photo was published on the Harvard Art Museum's website.
Art Journal states that the photo was clicked by German photographer Candida Hofer, and was part of a photo series called 'Türken in Deutschland 1979', meaning 'Turks in Germany 1979.
DiasporaTürk, an online community dedicated to collecting and documenting stories relating to Turkish immigrants in Europe had tweeted the viral photo in August 2020 saying that one of the grandsons of the couple in the photo had reached out to them and said that the family is from Aksaray, Turkey. The father in the photo had moved to Germany in 1965 and ten years later was able to bring his wife and four children to Düsseldorf.
On November 17, 2020, it dismissed the claim going viral stating that the boy in the yellow top who has been misidentified went on to become a lathe-leveling master (mechanic).
The same claim was previously fact-checked by Turkish fact-checker Teyit.
Additionally, Dr Ugur Sahin is from Iskenderun in Turkey, and not Aksaray. He had moved to Germany when he was four-years-old in 1969 as reported by The New York Times.
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