Social media influencers wooed for vax smear drive

A health worker prepares to inoculate a woman with the Chinese-made Vero Cell vaccine in Kathmandu. Pic/AFP

Social media influencers in France with hundreds of thousands of followers say a mysterious advertising agency offered to pay them if they agreed to smear a Covid-19 vaccine with negative fake stories.

French YouTuber Leo Grasset was among those contacted. He said on Tuesday that he was offered a potentially lucrative deal to make bogus claims that Pfizer's vaccine poses a deadly risk and that regulators and mainstream media are covering up the supposed dangers.

Grasset, who has 1.1 million subscribers on YouTube, says he refused. Other France-based influencers with audiences on Twitter and Instagram also said they were contacted with similar offers of payment for posts.

The person who contacted Grasset identified himself as Anton and said his agency has a "quite considerable" budget for what he described as an "information campaign" about "Covid-19 and the vaccines offered to the European population, notably AstraZeneca and Pfizer".

Anton asked for a video on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube to say that "the mortality rate of the Pfizer vaccine is 3 times greater than the AstraZeneca" and querying why the European Union is buying it.

A furious French Health Minister Olivier Veran said, "It's pathetic, it's dangerous, it's irresponsible and it doesn't work."

‘UK PM thought it was scare story'

London: Dominic Cummings, the former top aide of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, on Wednesday said the premier believed the first wave of Covid-19 was just a "scare story" at that time. He said officials in charge of the crisis last year were ‘out of their depth'.

Also Read: Relief for Uddhav Thackeray's teacher and old age home; leaders, officials swing into action

This story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed, agencies. Mid-day accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability, trustworthiness, reliability and data of the text. Mid-day management/mid-day.com reserves the sole right to alter, delete or remove (without notice) the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever