Claim that Klaus Schwab’s daughter warned of climate lockdowns is from misinformation site

A viral headline claims influential people are scheming to strip people of their freedoms in the name of climate change. 

"Klaus Schwab’s Daughter: ‘Permanent Climate Lockdowns Coming - Whether You Like It or Not," read a screenshot of a July 30 headline that garnered hundreds of thousands of views on platforms including X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and Instagram. 

"I will not comply," read a July 31 post sharing the headline. "Whether you like it or not."

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

(Screenshot from Instagram.)

The original article with that headline was published by The People’s Voice, a site known for publishing misinformation. The article’s author, Sean Adl-Tabatabai, is also known for spreading conspiracy theories and running misinformation sites. 

The headline appeared to promise an incendiary quote from Nicole Schwab, daughter of the World Economic Forum’s founder and executive chairman Klaus Scwab. But the article that followed did not deliver such a quote.

It included quotes from a June 2020 panel discussion with Nicole Schwab, a member of the World Economic Forum’s executive committee.  

Beyond the headline and a similar subhead, the article did not include the quote attributed to Nicole Schwab. 

We did not find any other published articles or information that included this quote by Nicole Schwab. 

A July 30 tweet of the headline included a community note that reached the same conclusion:  "In the article, there is no mention of Klaus Schwab’s daughter stating anything about permanent climate lockdowns. The word permanent is not even in the article besides the headline."

Since 2020, climate change skeptics have promoted the baseless idea that global elites will impose pandemic-style measures such as stay-at-home orders and lockdowns to restrict people’s freedoms in the name of preventing climate change, according to research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. PolitiFact has previously debunked a claim that leaders in the U.K. planned a "climate lockdown."

Featured Fact-check

Threads posts

stated on November 12, 2024 in a Threads post

“It was just Biden and Trump in 2020” general election ballots.

The People’s Voice article quoted Nicole Schwab discussing the need for increased sustainability and for creating jobs while also respecting nature. 

The article linked to a 50-second Rumble clip of Nicole Schwab speaking that ended before Schwab appeared to finish her remarks. But we located a longer version of the footage in which Schwab does not say the phrase "permanent climate lockdown." 

She said, "This (COVID-19) crisis has shown us that, first of all, things can shift very rapidly when we put our minds to it and when we feel the immediate emergency to our livelihoods. And second, that clearly the system — I mean, you mentioned it earlier — that we had before is not sustainable." 

She said the pandemic presented an opportunity to "have this great reset" and create significant change that would put "nature at the core of the economy."

Her remarks were a nod to a set of World Economic Forum policy ideas for economic recovery during the pandemic coined "The Great Reset." The initiative sparked a widely debunked conspiracy theory, which holds that elites who intend to establish a totalitarian global regime used the coronavirus to depopulate the earth and reorganize society.

We rate the claim that Nicole Schwab said, "Permanent climate lockdowns coming — whether you like it or not" False.

RELATED: No, a traffic management plan is not a ‘climate lockdown’ to confine people to their neighborhoods

RELATED: World Economic Forum chairman Klaus Schwab didn’t admit to forced lockdown plot