Is it true that the video shows the WHO director general dancing in a bar during self-isolation?

In early August, a video allegedly showing Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus dancing in a bar and wearing short shorts and a tank top went viral on the RuNet. We checked whether the person in the recording is indeed the head of WHO.

The video is divided into two parts: on the left is a real photo general director WHO, and on the right is footage of a man resembling Ghebreyesus dancing and drinking. Most often, in numerous posts on social networks and Telegram channels, the video is accompanied by the following caption: “This is the same Ghebreyesus, under whom pedophilia was deleted from the International Classification of Diseases.” In publics (examples here, here, here And here) and on the personal pages of VKontakte users (here, here, here And here) such publications began to appear en masse on August 2. Moreover, posts often refer to various Telegram channels, including “Bullet» (161,000 views), Putin TG Team (73,000), "Anonymous from USA» (20,000), "Russia now» (280,000), etc.

A careful search may reveal earlier similar publications. So, July 8, 2020 on the RIA Live24 website released news headlined “Incriminating evidence against the head of WHO was published by economist Delyagin.” On that day, politician Mikhail Delyagin actually shared a video with a dancing man who looks like Ghebreyesus. Attached to the video is a description from the Instagram* account @pravda_glazarezhet26: “As soon as you hear from serious sources that “WHO has made a statement,” just remember what kind of pigeons control it.” In general, two years ago, with the help of this video, Internet users provedthat Ghebreyesus himself does not comply with social distancing measures.

To begin with, we note that the messages that circulated this month contain two statements at once. One of them is that WHO has excluded the diagnosis of pedophilia from the new edition of the ICD. However, on this topic we already have went out separate material (and our verdict is fake), so in this text we will only consider the statement that Ghebreyesus is captured on the video. 

So, if we compare two videos that went viral in the summer 2020 year and summer 2022 years, you can notice a couple of significant differences. Firstly, the 2022 version lacks the Portuguese caption at the top of the video. It read: “Even the WHO president refused to isolate” (Até o presidente da OMS desistiu do isolamento). Secondly, in the old version, the signature @wilkervasconcelos was located in the middle, but in the new version of the video it is blurred out.

Wilker Vasconcelos is a Brazilian blogger who has pages on various social networks. Initially he posted video of interest to us on Twitter on June 11, 2020 and accompanied it with the caption “And this was filmed in Beth Cuscuz (night strip club. — Approx. ed.) in Terezin???". However, the tweet received only two likes, zero replays and just over 300 views. But the situation is different on Instagram: there is a post, published the next day with the caption “Even he is not following the quarantine anymore???”, has so far received almost 32,000 views and many comments. At the same time, some users asked whether the WHO head in the recording was true or if it was just a joke, and Vasconcelos answeredthat this is just a funny meme.

In addition, the distributed posts always have a low-quality video attached, while in the original by Vasconcelos one can see the man in more detail. Yes, in appearance he really does resemble the WHO director general, but a number of differences can be detected. For example, Ghebreyesus has a different shape of ears, chin and back of the head, and also has gray hair, which is not visible in a dancing man. According to services that use artificial intelligence to compare faces, these are two different people.

Using the key phrase “Até o presidente da OMS desistiu do isolamento” we were able to find a refutation from our colleagues from the Brazilian news portal G1, published back on June 16, 2020. They received the original video in better quality and examined the phone number placed on the T-shirt of the waitress who appears in the frame at the 16th second. The phone belonged to the owner of a bar in the city of Santos on the coast of Sao Paulo state. “I've already seen this video. I don't know who published it. The bar is now closed. This was definitely filmed several months ago, a long time ago. There was live music there. As of now, the bar has been closed for almost 90 days,” said the bar owner, who did not want to be named.

Brazilian journalists also drew attention to the TV behind the man in the video. They determined that they were showing the TV Globo program Domingão do Faustão, which was usually broadcast on Sundays. At that moment there was a quiz moment on the screen Ding Dong, where two celebrity teams guess tunes from the notes. On the screen you can see presenter Faustan in a black T-shirt with a white oval print, as well as singer Marcella Fogasa with her fiancé, actor Joaquim Lopez. This show came out aired February 16, 2020, we found it fragment on the channel's website. 

If the bar was not a recording of the broadcast or a replay of the program, then a man similar to Ghebreyesus was dancing several weeks before advertisements WHO coronavirus pandemic March 11, 2020. In addition, the head of WHO, being a native from Ethiopia, now lives and works in Geneva (Switzerland). However, on February 15, 2020, he arrived to Germany on the Munich conference on safety and was present there before its completion on the 16th, and the very next day he spoke in Geneva at a WHO conference on the spread of coronavirus. It is highly unlikely that with such a busy schedule, Dr. Tedros could have time to drop into Brazil to dance in a bar to live music.

Thus, the dancing person in the video is not the head of WHO, and the video itself, according to its author, was originally created as a joke.

*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social network Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.

Cover photo: video screenshot / Wilker Vasconcelos

Not true

What do our verdicts mean?

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