A video of a young volunteer, being examined by a health expert, is being shared on social media with a false claim that the girl is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s daughter, who has received the first COVID-19 vaccine.
The video started doing the rounds after Russia announced that they have developed the first vaccine for the novel coronavirus and that one of Putin’s daughters had already been inoculated.
However, this video in question, shows a young volunteer who took part in the clinical trial for the vaccine in the country and not Putin’s daughter.
CLAIM
A video shared on Facebook by a page called ‘Prime9news’ shared this video and wrote, “Vladmir Putin announced First Covid-19 Vaccine to the world, one of his daughter is vaccinated and she's doing fine – says Putin (sic)”.
The video has been viewed over 8,000 times since it was uploaded on 11 August.
Another video shared on another page, with a similar claim, garnered over 1,300 views in less than 24 hours.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We broke the video into several keyframes using Google Chrome extension InVid and followed it up with a reverse image search using Google search engine.
We then came across a report on RT, a state-controlled television network in Russia, which carried the same video in an article published on 20 July 2020.
The report mentioned that volunteers who had taken part in the clinical trial for a COVID-19 vaccine had been discharged from a military hospital in Moscow. It further added the volunteers were from military ranks and civilians who were observed for over 40 days.
The story nowhere mentions that the volunteer in the video is Putin’s daughter.
Further, we conducted another reverse search using Yandex search engine and came across a video on YouTube on 25 June which mentioned the volunteer’s name as ‘Natalia’.
There are several news reports on these volunteers and none of them identify her as Putin’s daughter.
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