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The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how one same piece of misinformation can go viral and jump from one country to another within minutes. That’s exactly what has happened with a schedule that lists the dates on which new coronavirus variants are allegedly going to appear. The calendar includes the logos of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Economic Forum (WEF), among other institutions and organizations, although they have nothing to do with it.
Since this summer right until December 2021, the fabricated timeline has been shared in several languages across 23 countries. Brecht Castel, a fact-checker at the Belgian outlet Knack (which is a signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network Code of Principles like Maldita.es), has tagged these countries in the following map.
No, the new coronavirus variant timeline is not real
Although branding from the WHO, the WEF, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins University can be seen in the viral image, the truth is none of them has authored or published this timeline, needless to say that the dates listed in the calendar are also wrong.
The websites of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the WHO detail when each variant was first detected. According to the latter, the Delta variant was first spotted in October 2020, whilst the viral schedule falsely claims that it surged in June 2021.
In fact, the appearance of new SARS-CoV-2 variants can’t be predicted as they emerge naturally when a virus mutates over time. The more such variants spread among the population, the more likely it is that we will face further variants.
For that reason, embracing actions and measures to contain the transmission of coronavirus (social distancing, face masks, vaccines etc.) also reduces the probability of new variants appearing. According to the WHO, these prevention measures “make it harder for the virus to transmit and, thus, fewer opportunities to mutate are conceded”.
The false calendar has been shared across the world since at least July 2021
Although it’s not clear where this false “strain timeline” comes from, we know that it has been shared on social media since at least the 7th of July 2021, as shown in the following archived screenshot:
As the Delta variant continued to expand during the summer, becoming the predominant variant worldwide, fact-checkers from the USA, UK, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Italy or India debunked the alleged document. However, it was widely shared once again when Omicron was detected in South Africa towards the end of November. That’s when we debunked it at Maldita.es, like other fact-checkers from Argentina, Canada or Brazil.
According to the fake timeline, Omicron was going to emerge in May 2022, so some used the schedule in Spain to claim that it had arrived “6 months in advance”. It has also been shared in Portuguese, English, Arabic, French, Georgian, German, Indonesian, Italian, Persian, Kazakh, Serbian, Dutch, Romanian, or Vietnamese.
The COVID-19 pandemic has proved that misinformation is a global phenomenon, Maldita.es has joined fact-checkers from all over the world in the Coronavirus Fact Alliance to tackle the most shared lies and falsehoods related to coronavirus.
