False posts claim Malaysian nurses forcibly jabbed with nonexistent vaccine

"Let us all Malaysians pray to Allah that Allah save the Nurses at the Hospital because they are being forced against their will to be injected with the new vaccine related to the X virus now," reads a Malay-language post shared here on Facebook on October 4, 2023.

It contains a five-minute clip urging Malaysians to help the nurses as they are "being persecuted by the Ministry of Health". The sticker text on the clip similarly claims nurses in the country are being forcibly vaccinated.

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Screenshot of the false post, taken on October 15, 2023

The post surfaced days after Malaysia's Health Minister Zaliha Mustafa said her office is on the alert for any possible disease that could cause a new pandemic, including "Disease X" (archived link).

"It is called X because we don't know what the disease is," she said in a press conference on September 25, 2023.

Similar false posts claiming Malaysian nurses are being forcibly vaccinated against "Disease X" have been shared elsewhere on Facebook here, here and here.

'Hypothetical disease'

Multiple experts, however, rubbished the claim.

"Disease X" is a hypothetical disease, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO) told AFP on October 15, 2023.

"It is a placeholder for 'any' possible infectious disease. Therefore you cannot develop a vaccine or treatment against an unknown hypothetical disease X," the spokesperson said.

The WHO said in November 2022 that it was thrashing out a new list of priority pathogens that risk sparking pandemics or outbreaks and should be kept under close observation, including "Disease X" (archived link).

"Disease X is included to indicate an unknown pathogen that could cause a serious international epidemic," the global agency said.

Ian Jones, professor of virology at Britain's Reading University, said there is no actual Virus X and it is a scenario used for planning purposes (archived link).

"The videos purporting to show vaccinations against it are false," he told AFP on October 10, 2023. "Disease X or Virus X does NOT exist and so there is no vaccine for it. As a result, the idea that anyone is being vaccinated against Disease X is nonsense."

Dr Thira Woratanarat, associate professor of preventive medicine at Thailand's Chulalongkorn University, similarly told AFP on the same day that "Disease X" refers to unknown pathogens that could cause a serious international epidemic (archived link)

"Actually, there are a lot of pathogens that we don't know them well enough, and they might be playing a role in future epidemics/pandemics," he said.