False: China has not sought approval to kill 20,000 coronavirus patients
The website seems to have lifted and published unfounded claims from another website in the wake of the novel coronavirus outbreak
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An article published by the Times Live on February 7, 2020 claiming that the Chinese government has sought the country’s Supreme Court’s approval to authorise the killing of more than 20,000 novel coronavirus patients is FALSE.
The article states that the Chinese Supreme People’s Court was to give approval on the case on 7 February 2020, but there has not been any such communication from the court.
The article seems to have been lifted from ab-tc.com, which published the same story on 6 February 2020. This website previously published a false story about Kenyan medical students developing a vaccine for novel coronavirus.
The claim has not been published in any credible news outlets, and the World Health Organization has also not mentioned it on their situation reports.
There is also no mention of this alleged court case on the the Supreme People’s Court of the People’s Republic of China website.
Times Live Kenya, the website that has published this claim, appears to have copied their page layout and branding from TimesLIVE of South Africa. The website contains stories that appear to be clickbait, and that are designed for shock value rather than sharing actual news.
A number of fact-checking organizations have debunked the claim that China is seeking to kill 20,000 coronavirus patients, including The Quint, Vishvas News, and Dubawa.
PesaCheck has looked into the claim that China has sought approval to kill over 20,000 coronavirus patients to avoid further spread of the virus and finds it to be false.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
Have you spotted what you think is fake news or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.
This fact-check was written by PesaCheck Researcher Sylvia Makinia and edited by PesaCheck Deputy Editor Ann Ngengere.
The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck Managing Editor Eric Mugendi.
PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water / sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is a joint initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with additional funding support from the International Budget Partnership (Kenya) and Twaweza, in partnership with a coalition of local media organisations, and the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).