At a glance:

• Claim: Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr said the Sinovac vaccine is good enough for poor Filipinos despite its 50.4% efficacy rate.
• Rating: FALSE
• The facts: The quote card containing the claim was manipulated. The government’s coronavirus task force also denied that Galvez released such a statement.
• Why we fact-checked this: Multiple Facebook accounts and pages shared the fake quote card, as spotted by monitoring tools Claim Check and CrowdTangle.

Complete details:

A fake quote card attributed a false quote to vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. It circulated on Facebook as early as Monday, February 22.

The statement attributed to him said: “Huwag po nating maliitin ang Sinovac. Bagamat 50.4% lang ang efficacy nito, mas mainam na ito kesa wala. Hindi lamang talaga pwede sa mga health workers ang mababang efficacy rate. Pwede na ito sa mga mahihirap nating mga kababayan kaysa masayang.”

(Let’s not belittle Sinovac. Although its efficacy rate is only 50.4%, it’s better than nothing. We really just can’t administer a vaccine with a low efficacy rate to our health workers. This is good enough for our poor countrymen instead of letting it go to waste.)

The statement was referring to CoronaVac, the vaccine developed by Chinese firm Sinovac.

This is false. The original quote card came from ABS-CBN News in December 2020, but it contained a different statement from Galvez about the country’s acquisition of COVID-19 vaccines. The fake quote card cropped out the logo of ABS-CBN at the bottom of the graphic.

ABS-CBN News also clarified in a social media post on Tuesday, February 23, that the circulating quote card that mentioned Sinovac did not come from them.

In a Facebook post also on Tuesday, the government’s coronavirus task force denied the claim that Galvez said such a statement. Galvez “has never issued any such public statement and will never do so,” the task force said.

There are also no reports from legitimate news sources that confirm Galvez said the quote attributed to him in the fake quote card.

On Monday, Malacañang staunchly defended CoronaVac after it secured Philippine emergency use approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). However, the FDA’s regulatory and medical experts did not recommend its use among health workers since they have high exposure to COVID-19.

Still, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said “economic frontliners,” including transport workers and farmers, may get the Sinovac doses first.

The Sinovac vaccine has a lower efficacy rate of 50.4% from trials in Brazil involving health workers, but Phase 3 trials showed it had an efficacy rate of 65.3% to 91.2% among healthy individuals 18 to 59 years old.

Claim Check, Facebook’s monitoring tool that identifies potentially dubious posts shared on the platform, flagged at least two Facebook accounts that shared the fake quote card. Rappler also spotted through social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle at least 4 more Facebook pages that posted the false graphic. – Pauline Macaraeg/Rappler.com

Keep us aware of suspicious Facebook pages, groups, accounts, websites, articles, or photos in your network by contacting us at factcheck@rappler.com. Let us battle disinformation one Fact Check at a time.