Video show passenger getting kicked off plane over argument on vaccination status? Fact Check

ByCraig Haley

A video allegedly showing a woman in an aircraft refusing to sit by an unvaccinated man only to then be thrown off the aircraft by its pilot is spreading on social media. In most instances of the video we saw, the caption or attributed comments suggest the video shows a real encounter.

FALSE

In the context of the video showing a genuine encounter, we rank the video as false, since it actually shows a scripted scene featuring actors. An example of the video is below.

While many viewers of the video were sceptical of the video from the onset due to the scripted and theatrical nature of the dialog, many viewers appear to have taken the video as a genuine incident. This appears fuelled in part by many social media channels with large followings implying the video is authentic when posting it.

However, as fellow debunking page HoaxEye had already found out, the incident was scripted, and there is even an entry on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) for the small film, which can be seen here.

The small film is called Covid Flight, and reveals the actors playing the role of the pilot and argumentative passenger. According to the IMDB page, the movie was directed by Jamie Hull-Greenwood.


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Hull-Greenwood had also posted a picture of the cast on his Instagram page, as per below.

The executive producer is listed as Prince EA who also posted the same video to his 18-million strong Facebook page. Like many others posting the video, is was not immediately made clear in his post that the video was actually scripted, with the caption “ VAXXED OR UNVAXXED, NO ONE SHOULD BEHAVE LIKE THIS“. He later added the addendum “For entertainment purposes only”.

Looking at Prince EA’s profile it is clear he specialises in producing videos designed to spread virally on social media. Many other videos that attribute him as “executive producer” show other scripted videos that could be mistaken for genuine encounters that also exploit controversial “hot button” topics, including a video of a police officer planting drugs in a car belonging to an African American. Many of these videos are also given rather “clickbaity” titles, such as “big mouth bully picks on nerd. What happens next will shock you“.

Given that the video is scripted with its own IMDB page, we rank the claim that it shows a genuine encounter as false.