No, there is not an international coordinated effort to place people in ‘COVID camps’

Embattled conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is claiming on his social media accounts that private citizens around the world are at risk of being placed in "COVID camps."

Founder of the far-right conspiracy media organization InfoWars, Jones posited on his social platforms that citizens of International Monetary Fund member countries would be forced into quarantine housing.

"The COVID camps are here," Jones said in his Oct. 15 episode of "The Alex Jones Show", a clip of which was shared in an Oct. 16 Instagram post. "Anyone against lockdowns and election fraud … are at risk of being placed into these camps."

The measures, he added, stand to potentially affect "millions and millions and millions of people."

The post was flagged as part of Instagram’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

The claim came days after a Connecticut jury ordered Jones to pay nearly $1 billion to the families of eight of 26 people killed in a 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. Jones has repeatedly falsely claimed the shooting was a hoax.

By Jones’ logic, the COVID-19 virus is a man-made illness meant to infect conservatives who live in any of the 190 IMF member countries — which includes Canada, China and the United States — and ultimately force them to quarantine in designated pods away from the general public.

In the video, Jones pointed to several headlines from news articles he suggested support his claim.

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One, from a May 18 Bloomberg article, read, "This is how China rounds up thousands of people for quarantine," one Bloomberg headline from a May 18 article reads.

Another, from an 2020 Euronews article, read, "What is life like inside Europe’s coronavirus quarantine centres?"

These articles do not say millions of private citizens are being admitted to centers due to political beliefs or attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines or mitigation measures, as Jones claimed.

China has constructed "centralized isolation facilities" to provide 20,000 isolation beds across three sites, according to a report published by Bloomberg last month. Anyone who tests positive for the virus is required to sequester in one of these isolation facilities for at least a week, Bloomberg reported. Admission to these centers is not indefinite.

The EuroNews article included a list of temporary quarantine set-ups at area hospitals across parts of Europe and the United Kingdom. People who were required to stay at these sites had traveled from China in February 2020 were required to do so for a two-week period. They were not remanded there permanently.

He also showed a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention document that has been falsely described as a plan to put "high risk" people in camps. It was updated in July 2020 and was titled "Interim Operational Considerations for Implementing the Shielding Approach to Prevent COVID-19 Infections in Humanitarian Settings." But it was a discussion document and stated that there was "no empirical evidence" that such an approach would reduce mortality from COVID-19 infections, and it emphasized the method’s inherent challenges and risks. 

There is no indication any of these efforts are part of a widespread international phenomenon affecting "millions and millions and millions," as Jones claimed.

Jones claimed in a video that "millions" of people around the world at risk of being placed in "COVID camps"

While quarantine centers exist in some countries, such as China, there is no evidence to suggest this is a widespread international phenomenon.

We rate the claim False.