A video is being circulated on Russian-language social networks in which deputies of the Brazilian parliament allegedly break into a hospital and do not find 5,000 patients listed in the institution. We have verified the accuracy of this video.

The very low quality video is less than two and a half minutes long. The video shows several men dressed in black breaking through a high fence, and then one of them begins to loudly shout at the man in white. After the editing, we are shown a certain room where the same man in black screams loudly, surrounded by several people in uniform and empty hospital beds. Users posted the video on their pages Facebook, "VKontakte", "Odnoklassniki", forum "I cried" and other social networks. Most of these posts have a caption that reads something like this: “Members of the Brazilian Parliament burst into a hospital whose management said they had 5,000 infections and 200 deaths from COVID-19. In fact, the hospital was empty.” Based on the video, numerous Internet users and Covid dissidents conclude that the morbidity statistics are “drawn up” not only in Brazil, but also in other countries, and the scale of the pandemic is, for one reason or another, deliberately exaggerated.

Our colleagues at AFP Fact Check discovered that the video being circulated around the world is part of an almost hour-long video, published at the end of May 2020. It was posted on his YouTube channel by Philippe Pubel, deputy Parliament of the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro. The caption for the video reads: “Deputy Pubel conducts an inspection of the field hospital.” Brazilian media also reported on the parliamentarian’s trip, for example Estadão And Folha de São Paolo.

At the very beginning of the original video, the politician said in Portuguese: “I arrive at the hospital in Sao Gonçalo, which was supposed to open today, but did not open. We will check." For half an hour, the deputy stood at the gate, talked on the phone, emotionally described what was happening, knocked on the fence and cursed the state governor. What was happening was broadcast on Pubel’s social networks - this explains the vertical orientation of the camera. After some time the politician called police and, without waiting for her arrival, ordered his guards to find a way inside. Having entered the territory of the hospital, Pubel scolded the representative of the regional Ministry of Health and showed subscribers the condition of the yet-to-be-opened hospital.

Although local media call Pubel a populist (he represents the party of the country's President Jair Bolsonaro, who, in the midst of a pandemic, demonstratively did not wear a mask and did not maintain social distance), the interest of Brazilians in the problem with this hospital is understandable. Hospital in Sao Gonçalo should have opened back in April 2020, and in total the launch of the institution was postponed no less than four once. As a result, the hospital earned three weeks after Pubel's "inspection", however, at that moment he was only ready to accept 40 patients, which was a fifth of the planned capacity.

So first foreign, and about a year later, Russian-speaking social media users completely distorted the course of events. The video being distributed on the Internet is edited from a video dedicated to a hospital that has not yet opened - there are no patients there simply because they could not be there. The popular caption to the video is also untrue: there was only one deputy, he represents the regional, not the federal parliament, and even a functioning hospital could not accept 5,000 patients (it is designed for only 200 patients).

Cover photo: REUTERS/Amanda Perobelli