"Let us all Malaysians pray to Allah that Allah save the Nurses at the Hospital because they are being forced against their will to be injected with the new vaccine related to the X virus now," reads a Malay-language post shared here on Facebook on October 4, 2023.
It contains a five-minute clip urging Malaysians to help the nurses as they are "being persecuted by the Ministry of Health". The sticker text on the clip similarly claims nurses in the country are being forcibly vaccinated.
Screenshot of the false post, taken on October 15, 2023
The post surfaced days after Malaysia's Health Minister Zaliha Mustafa said her office is on the alert for any possible disease that could cause a new pandemic, including "Disease X" (archived link).
"It is called X because we don't know what the disease is," she said in a press conference on September 25, 2023.
Similar false posts claiming Malaysian nurses are being forcibly vaccinated against "Disease X" have been shared elsewhere on Facebook here, here and here.
Multiple experts, however, rubbished the claim.
"Disease X" is a hypothetical disease, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO) told AFP on October 15, 2023.
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