The originator of the false information had taken an extract of the "Salakuna" TV program attended by Basil Rajapaksa on 04.01.2021, and used it out of context. In the original program, Basil Rajapaksa was speaking of the experimental intake of Ukrainian tourists in late 2020 and early 2021, and admits that it was a risk that the government decided to take, and went on to take vaccine trials [conducted in other countries] as an example where some of the volunteers would get administered the actual trial vaccine and the rest would get administered a neutral substance (he took water as the example) as a placebo test. He was not referring to administering part of the population water during the actual vaccine drive in the country. The full recording of the program can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7APfq2owvMM. The extracted part is roughly from 30.16 to 30.38.