A video that’s been shared over 10,000 times on Facebook from someone who calls himself the “Old Man in a Chair” makes a number of misleading statements about the status of various Covid-19 vaccines being issued in the UK.

His main claim seems to be that the Covid-19 vaccines are “experimental”, and that anyone who gets a vaccine is taking part in an experiment without their consent. This is not true.

Three Covid-19 vaccines have been approved by the UK regulator for use at the time of writing: the Moderna vaccine, the Oxford and AstraZeneca, and the Pfizer-BioNTech.

Multiple stages of trials have proved that these three vaccines are safe and effective, some of which have happened concurrently to speed up the process. 

Just because studies into these vaccines are continuing at the same time, doesn’t mean anyone getting the vaccine in the nationwide roll-out is part of a trial. 

Consent must be given by patients to get any vaccines, and for that to be valid they must be “offered as much information as they reasonably need to make their decision, and in a form that they can understand”.

A number of posts on social media claim that the name of market research company Ipsos MORI translates to ‘they die’ in Latin.

A TikTok video being shared widely on Whatsapp warns people this means they will die if they get a Covid-19 test. Other claims on Facebook also warn about the company name.

Online translators do say that Ipsos MORI translates to ‘they die’ in English (although in fact the literal translation is more garbled and not grammatically correct).

Ipsos MORI says its name “doesn’t mean anything”; it is the product of a 2005 merger of Ipsos—a French company which took its name from the Latin phrase ‘ipso facto’—and UK firm Market and Opinion Research International (MORI).

You are not going to die if you get tested for Covid-19. More than 71.5 million Covid-19 tests have been conducted across the UK since the pandemic began.

There are no reports of anyone dying because of a Covid-19 test. It is important to get tested if you have symptoms.

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