After Uganda’s health minister received a COVID-19 vaccine in March, a widely-circulated tweet claimed that the syringe was empty and did not pierce her skin.

In actuality, while Jane Ruth Aceng had received the vaccine at a press conference, reporters asked her to do an additional demonstration so they could capture clear photos and videos to illustrate her receiving the vaccine. It’s these photos that went viral and led some members of the public to question their trust in the COVID-19 vaccine.

Doreen Wainainah, who’s based in Nairobi and is the news editor of PesaCheck, one of Africa’s largest fact-checking initiatives, explained how some people online used this moment to harm people’s confidence in the vaccine.

“They took that particular clip [of the injection demonstration] without the original clip [of the actual vaccination] and said: If the minister is not being vaccinated, why are you getting vaccinated when the government doesn't trust the vaccine?” she said.

Within 24 hours, the video had hundreds of thousands of views across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, according to Wainainah.

“It was being used to propel the anti-vaccination narrative,” Wainainah said.

When the clip reached her team, they were able to contact journalists present at the press event for additional evidence and an explanation, which was used to dispel the video.

Wainainah and her team of 20 fact-checkers across a dozen African countries work every day to find and debunk viral claims on social networks and in the media. They produce stories in four languages — English, French, Swahili, and Amharic — to help ensure that people have access to accurate news information.

In March 2020, as the pandemic took hold around the world, the team at PesaCheck began seeing a spike in misinformation about COVID-19.

Read the full article about PesaCheck's fact-checking work by Jacky Habib at Global Citizen.