What was claimed
The World Economic Forum required that pilots flying visitors to its annual meeting in Davos had to be unvaccinated.
Our verdict
The WEF has confirmed that this is false.
The WEF hasn’t required unvaccinated pilots for Davos delegates
20 January 2023
Posts on Facebook claim that the World Economic Forum (WEF) has required that pilots flying delegates to its annual meeting in Davos this week are unvaccinated.
This is not true.
One post says: “WEF Hires Unvaccinated Pilots To Fly Them Into Davos: ‘Safety of Our Members Is No. 1 Priority’. Klaus Schwab has banned vaccinated pilots from transporting World Economic Forum members in and out of Davos due to the safety risk they pose.”
Another says: “WEF requiring unvaccinated pilots”.
Full Fact put these claims to the WEF, which told us: “This is fake.”
The claim seems to come from an article on News Punch, which shares the same picture and headline as one of the posts that appeared the following day.
As we have said before, News Punch has a history of publishing misinformation, according to other fact checkers.
The News Punch article claimed that Josh Yoder, the head of a group that campaigns against Covid-19 vaccinations for passengers and personnel, had said he was “receiving inquiries from Davos elites interested in hiring unvaccinated pilots to fly their business trips”.
But Mr Yoder later denied that “the WEF/Davos” had contacted him about this.
The WEF is a common subject of misinformation that we have written about many times before.
Besides supposedly planning to cancel Christmas, people have claimed that the WEF is planning for a future without pets, has its own paramilitary force, is engineering the world’s climate, and has said it is racist not to eat bugs. None of this is true.
Image courtesy of Evangeline Shaw
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the WEF has not requested unvaccinated pilots.