Facebook (FB) page Kapamilya World posted a photo supposedly showing a Feb. 6 press briefing by the Department of Health (DOH) where a window curtain was used as table cloth. This is misleading.
The image is a year old. It was originally uploaded on Feb. 2, 2020 by the official Twitter account of the World Health Organization (WHO) Philippines. This was the day the Philippines announced its first fatality from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
The picture shows Health Secretary Francisco Duque III, Food and Drug Administration director-general Eric Domingo and WHO representative to the Philippines Rabindra Abeyasinghe, among others, seated across a table.
Kapamilya World’s post was captioned, “A press conference held by DOH earlier! A reflection of readiness by the department in combating this world event.” It carried the hashtags #DuqueAnoNaSir, #CTTP, #1stPHCoVFatality. CTTP is a shorthand for the phrase “credits to the photographer.”
Despite the last hashtag providing a clue on when the photo might have been taken, some netizens mistook the event to be recent.
One person said, “They don’t even wear face mask and shield, how can you expect people to believe them!!”
“Walang pangbili kasi ubos na ang pundo dahil sa pandemya (Couldn’t buy [a proper table cloth] because the budget had depleted due to the pandemic),” read another comment.
There are 31,478 active COVID-19 cases and 11,469 COVID-related deaths in the country so far, according to Feb. 11 data from DOH’s COVID-19 tracker.
Kapamilya World’s misleading post, which has gotten over 1,200 reactions and 200 shares, was published a day after the DOH was allocated an additional P362 million budget for detecting new COVID-19 variants.
Kapamilya World was created on July 27, 2018. The term “kapamilya” is largely used to refer to patrons of ABS-CBN, but the page states in its description box that it is unaffiliated with the network.
(Editor’s Note: VERA Files has partnered with Facebook to fight the spread of disinformation. Find out more about this partnership and our methodology.)
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