Clip shows schoolgirls affected by tear gas, not vaccination

The 21-second video of a group of girls sitting on hospital beds covering their faces and struggling to breathe was shared on X on September 16, 2025.

"After forced vaccinations in schools, many girls became ill and had to be hospitalised. For God's sake!" reads the Urdu-language caption.

"Take a clear and blunt stance on your children. All the experiments in the world are always done on us poor people. There is no help for flood victims, but the West is giving free vaccines," it continues. The post has been reshared 1,800 times.

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Screenshot of the false post taken September 19, 2025, with a red X added by AFP

Pockets of Pakistan's border regions remain resistant to inoculation as a result of misinformation and conspiracy theories (archived link). A fake vaccination campaign organised by the US Central Intelligence Agency in Pakistan in 2011 to track Osama bin Laden compounded the mistrust.

Similar posts surfaced on Facebook, YouTube and TikTok after the launch of a national HPV vaccination campaign to prevent cervical cancer in girls aged nine to 14 by the Pakistan government in partnership with the international organisation for vaccination Gavi, Unicef and the World Health Organization (archived link).

But the video is unrelated to the recent inoculation campaign.

Reverse image searches on Google found the clip was shared by journalist Basharat Raja on X on May 9, 2024 (archived link).

The post reads: "This is also a clip from Dadyal where tear gas was excessively used by police and unidentified individuals dressed in civilian clothes in schools, causing female students engaged in annual examinations to faint."

AFP reached out to Raja but did not receive a response.

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A screenshot comparison between the false post (L) and the X post from May, 2024 (R). Taken by AFP on September 19, 2025.

Further keyword searches led to a report by Pakistan newspaper Dawn on May 10, 2024 about police in Dadyal, a town in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, clashing with trader activists protesting "unjust" taxes levied on electricity bills (archived link).

"The teargas shells lobbed by the police also landed in a school and deteriorated the condition of several girls," the report says.

Chaudhry Shahid, a Kashmir-based journalist who covered the incident, told AFP on September 18, 2025 the video was taken in Dadyal after tear gas shells fell on a school near the protests.

The Dadyal Deputy Superintendent of Police, Ishtiaq Gillani, separately said the video is unrelated to vaccination.

"The video that is viral has nothing to do with the vaccination, it is from an incident in Dadyal from last year in which police clashed with protesters," he told AFP on September 18.

More fact-checks on vaccine-related misinformation could be found here.