Fact check: Fake video depicting 'zombie virus' outbreak in China revived

MANILA, Philippines — A reposted version of a five-month-old YouTube video alleging that a viral "zombie" virus is infecting people in China and the country’s government wants to conceal the news has been making the rounds online. This is false.

CLAIM: A TikTok video has alleged that a 48,500-year-old "zombie" virus newly discovered by scientists has resulted in an outbreak in China and that the country's government is hiding this from the world to avoid panic.

RATING: This is false.

Facts: 

What the video says

A TikTok video uploaded on April 3 shows spliced clips of several movie scenes and real news reports on how thawing permafrost — or frozen layer of soil beneath the ground — in the Arctic could potentially stir dormant viruses that date back thousands of years. 

The TikTok video uses only a short part of a video first uploaded on YouTube by "Mr. Pantas" in December 2022, which gathered more than 700,000 views. The YouTube channel brands itself as a "foreign discovery channel."

The video also showed a clip of an individual lying immobile on the ground and being approached by others.

The TikTok video’s caption reads: "ZOMBIE VIRUS, NADISKUBRE NG MGA SCIENTISTS! (Viral ngayon!)... (DISCOVERED BY SCIENTISTS! Viral now!)" 

A voiceover used in the video also alleged that the Chinese government is hiding the events from the public to avoid panic.

What the video left out 

No such viral outbreak has taken place in China. Several iterations of this claim have been debunked by VERA Files, PolitiFact, Newsweek and the Associated Press. 

The TikTok video also spliced and took out-of-context clips from a zombie-themed event in Indonesia called "Train to Apocalypse" hosted by a light rail transit station in 2022.

While it is true that reputable news organizations reported on scientists' discovery of ancient viruses after permafrost melted. But these strains of viruses can only infect amoeba and do not pose a serious health risk to humans.

Moreover, one of the scientists who co-authored a 2023 study published in the "Viruses" journal on ancient viruses stored in permafrost told Newsweek that these "will never infect a human cell, because evolution of close to a billion years separates human cells from amoeba."  

Based on the study, the term "zombie viruses" was used to refer to the virus strains that have been stored for thousands of years old and are now being revived and studied by scientists by inserting these into cultured cells. 

The study also stated: "Fortunately, we can reasonably hope that an epidemic caused by a revived prehistoric pathogenic bacterium could be quickly controlled by the modern antibiotics at our disposal."

Essential context 

The researchers studying ancient viruses in permafrost conducted the research to gain a better understanding of how animal- or human-infecting viruses could remain infectious for thousands of years.

In the same interview with Newsweek, scientist and co-author Jean-Michel Claverie said: "If amoeba viruses can survive that long in permafrost, this strongly suggests that animal / human-infecting (viruses) could remain infectious in the same condition. In addition, we know that the DNA (of animal- or human-infecting viruses) are detected in permafrost."

Evidence has also shown that melting ice can lead to a virus spillover as a separate study on the Arctic lake in 2022 suggested that there is an increased risk for viruses to catch onto new hosts in areas close to large amounts of glacial meltwater.

An IPCC report in 2019 warned that extreme sea level events, such as sea level rise, will occur more often in greater parts of the world due to global warming. 

Why we fact-checked this

The TikTok video has received at least 2.3 million views, 160,000 likes and 5,000 comments. 

While some comments merely poked fun at the clips shown in the video, other users said that the news was "worrying" and a "sign of worse things to come" after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The TikTok user who posted the video has more than 33,000 followers.