Pakistani Actress Mehwish Hayat has won hearts on Twitter after slamming journalist Tarek Fateh for spreading fake news by sharing a clip from her movie and passing it off as a real video of Pakistanis refusing to have their children vaccinated against the crippling disease polio.
Fateh had shared the video saying that the Pakistani mother slammed the door in the face of polio workers and screamed at two female volunteers.
The woman in the video says: “I will not give polio drops to my kids because they get sick after taking the drops. I can’t take them to the hospital every time. I don’t have that much money. Drops cost Rs. 800, you give me that much money and I will get food but not give my kids the drops.”
The scene is from Hayat’s movie, a 2018 Pakistani romantic social comedy film, ‘Load Wedding’, which featured the scene in order to create awareness about the urgency of vaccination against polio.
Netizens slammed the journalist and lauded Hayat for calling him out.
Pakistan remains one of the three remaining countries in the world where polio is endemic, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).
Pakistan launched a Polio Eradication Programme in 1994 and ever since, there has been a massive decline in polio cases, from approximately 20,000 every year in the early 1990s to only eight cases in 2018, UNICEF stated. The first effective polio vaccine was developed in 1952 by Jonas Salk and a team of scientists at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, US.