FALSE CLAIMS THAT Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, warned that a lockdown might be imposed were shared widely online as England fought a fatal meningitis outbreak.

The claims spread after two young adults died from meningitis earlier this month, in an outbreak believed to have spread in a Kent nightclub.

Health officials have said that the outbreak is past its peak, according to the BBC.

Wide scale health measures were enacted around the time the outbreak peaked, including thousands of doses of preventative antibiotics and additional vaccines shots.

But social media was haunted by the prospect of a more dreaded initiative, reminiscent of the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Keir Starmer could say that the UK may need to go into LOCKDOWN as early as May if meningitis cases continue to escalate,” a number of posts across different social media platforms read.

On Facebook, these posts have been shared hundreds of times, while on X, a single post with this message has been viewed more than 235,000 times since 19 March — at the time of writing it has no visible Community Notes, X’s crowdsourced anti-misinformation initiative.

Many of these posts claim that this is part of a plan to control future elections.

Others say that it is to scare people into taking a meningitis vaccine that will be released in the future (the meningitis vaccine has been part of the vaccination schedule since 2015; pharmacists say they cannot keep up with demand from people in older cohorts opting to get a vaccine).

In either case, the initial claim is not real. There have been no credible reports that Keir Starmer or his government was preparing to impose a lockdown in May.

Further, as reported by Full Fact, the Prime Minister’s office confirmed that Starmer never made such comments.

An unfounded fear of lockdowns has been prevalent on social media since the Covid-19 pandemic, when significant restrictions were imposed in place to stop the spread of the disease.

Lockdowns were often speculated by some groups to be part of a wider conspiracy to take control of society or permanently curtail civil liberties.

Many of the groups that coalesced to share these conspiracy theories are still active, though their focus has often moved on to other topics.

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