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In March, Health Minister Dato’ Sri Dr Adham Baba had announced that fully vaccinated people will be issued a COVID-19 vaccine badge
The announcement by the Health Minister was made during a joint press conference with Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Parliament and Law) Datuk Seri Takiyuddin Hassan on 17 March.
“The badge, which has the bearer’s personal details such as their name and MyKad, certifies that he or she is vaccinated,” Dr Adham Baba was reported as saying by New Straits Times.
“It has a security code, so it can’t be duplicated and would be distributed by the millions for future use,” he said, adding that a vaccine certificate will also be released on the MySejahtera app.
During the announcement at the time, Dr Adham Baba was seen promoting what appears to be a sample of how the vaccine badge would look with one side containing a QR code for authentication
Image via BERNAMA TV/YouTube
There has been no further announcement since then, but recently a video clip from the joint press conference went viral on Twitter
The tweet, posted yesterday morning, 22 July, has close to 2,000 retweets at the time of writing.
However, the quote tweets — which are double in numbers and increasing by over 100 quote tweets every few minutes — are where the context about the tweet’s virality lies.
An eagle-eyed Malaysian, @kennleandre, figured out that the QR code in the vaccine badge actually leads to an unrelated source — to the SoundCloud of a former teacher in England known as the ICT Evangelist.
Image via @kennleandre (Twitter)
Since then more people have jumped in, asking others to check out the QR code.
Image via @khairizulfadhli (Twitter)
And now Malaysians are spamming the ICT Evangelist’s SoundCloud
The SoundCloud clip is nine years old and it had no comments prior to Malaysians finding it.
One of the new comments questioned why a random QR code was used for the badge announcement, highlighting that the government could have simply created a dummy QR code that could have been linked to the Ministry of Health (MOH) for anyone who tried scanning for further instructions.
Others were less explanatory and more critical of the government.
Meanwhile, several of them couldn’t help but laugh and wonder why there was even a need to copy a random QR code from the Internet
— KZ (@teknosual) July 23, 2021
Why would anyone………
— The Huda (@nabilahudatahar) July 23, 2021