After Covid and vaccines, fake news about monkeypox are starting to rain down on X. “This is Marco. My son. He is hospitalized in intensive care after contracting #monkeypox, or as it is called today #Gayolodellescimmie. Since he started frequenting the LGBT community he has always been subject to strange diseases and parasites. I am devastated”, wrote a few days ago a supposedly worried parent, also posting a photo of a patient among wires and various machines, in a hospital bed. In the photo, however, there is no son. The patient portrayed is Sammy Basso, the ‘young old man’ suffering from Progeria, or Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome, a rare genetic disease that causes premature aging of cells and the body, but not of the brain.
It doesn’t take long for X users to recognize the image as Sammy Basso, known for his numerous television appearances and interviews about his illness and the work of the association he founded with his parents when he was just 10 years old, but above all famous after the airing of the National Geographic docu-film ‘Sammy’s Journey’, which recounts his journey along Route 66 in the USA with his parents and one of his best friends.
The controversy immediately erupts. And the post is overwhelmed by a flurry of denials and criticisms, many write that they reported it to X and to Sammy himself. “He is not your son, he is Sammy Basso, and I hope he sues you. You make me vomit”, “I hope they report you”, “report in bursts”, “I hope Sammy Basso takes off your underwear too”, are just some of the most recurring comments.
To highlight that this is fake news, readers added the information “the person in the photo is Sammy Basso and the photo dates back to 2019. The author of the post only intends to smear the Lgbtqia+ community by giving false information” to the photo.
The photograph, in fact, portrays Sammy Basso after a very complicated heart surgery performed at the San Camillo hospital in Rome in February 2019, the first in the world on a patient with progeria. Since this morning, for several hours, the hashtag Sammy Basso has been trending on X. Indignant tweets and comments pour in, until the post is deleted by the author, Gioele Levi/Erminia Ottoneh. As the users themselves report, it is a troll, who also deletes the profile after the post.
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