HOAX: Pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline does not own the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is operated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is funded, to a large extent, by the Chinese government.
A claim that pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline owns the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China is FALSE.
A few days after news broke that the Pfizer vaccine for COVID-19 was being prepared for distribution, a rumor started circulating on social media in Kenya and across the world that GlaxoSmithKline owned a laboratory in China at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where conspiracy theorists allege the virus originated.
The rumor attempts to trace a line from GlaxoSmithKline to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, to billionaire philanthropist George Soros, and to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Here’s the version of the rumor that was posted on Facebook in Kenya:
Research by PesaCheck shows that the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline does not own the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research lab in China, is operated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and is funded, in large part, by the Chinese government. It is not owned by GlaxoSmithKline as the post claims.
It’s also false to say that GlaxoSmithKline owns the pharmaceutical company, Pfizer.
While these two companies share some common interests — in 2018, they announced a joint venture that combined their consumer health businesses — they remain two distinct companies. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that:
“Pfizer Inc. and GlaxoSmithKline PLC plan to combine their consumer health-care units and eventually spin off the joint venture, creating the world’s largest seller of drugstore staples like Advil and Sensodyne toothpaste.”
From the above information, it is clear that the joint venture does not involve one company buying out the other.
The rumor appears to have been created with the intent of stirring up confusion and skepticism over the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine by connecting the pharmaceutical companies to the Wuhan laboratory. GlaxoSmithKline, however, does not own the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
PesaCheck has looked into the claim that pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline owns the Wuhan Institute of Virology 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 fact-checker James Okong’o and edited by PesaCheck deputy editor Cathy Wamaitha. It was approved for publication by managing editor Enock Nyariki.
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 an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.
