#MOREVIRALTHANTHEVIRUS is a Global COVID Youth Movement and an International COVID-19 Initiative started by 27 medical students, known for our work for combatting misinformation.
This campaign was founded by Ian Soh, alongside Co-founders, Aaron Goh and Klaus Tan on 22 March 2020. Ever since the campaign went live on 26 March 2020, we have combatted misinformation in over 50 languages and our initiatives have reached more than 1, 500, 000 people and counting. During the global lockdown in 2020 with no funding whatsoever using only simple means such as Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram, we managed to unite young people from over 100 different countries in just 10 days.
As we are only students, we are unable to treat any COVID-19 patients.
However, we believe that we have a social responsibility to be an alternative voice to educate our peers (other young people) of the key messages of the WHO, address the worrying attitudes of young people, correct any misinformation and disinformation among our different age groups, tackle issues related to mental health and highlight other pertinent COVID-19 issues.
We have worked to achieve this by empowering Youth and Young adults from different nationalities and backgrounds with a voice of their own to highlight issues within their local communities, and opportunities to expand their initiatives regionally and globally.
MoreViralThanTheVirus has supported various global initiatives by WHO (EG. WHO 2020 International Youth Day and WHO’s 3rd Infodemiology Conference etc.), UNESCO (EG. 2020 Global Media & Information Literacy week), Global Youth Mobilization (for their 2021 Global Youth Summit), IFRC (for their Asia Pacific Youth Cafe), the RCCE community, the COVID Youth survey (with IFMSA, Global Shapers and UNESCO GAPMIL ambassadors) and many more. Our work has also been featured by international presses like the BBC, Telegraph, Aljazeera, Deutsche Presse-Agentur and various local presses from France, México, Singapore, Thailand, South Africa, Malaysia and more.
May #MOREVIRALTHANTHEVIRUS be a symbol of hope for everyone. Our movement has shown that even in one of the greatest healthcare crisis of all time, with many countries going into Lockdown. We are still able to unite Youths globally in our Movement.
This instills hope during and beyond this COVID-19 Pandemic crisis.
Only together, can we make a difference during this COVID-19 crisis.