Reuters
Several French social media sites say they have been approached by a communications agency that offered them money to spread negative publicity about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, a ploy the health minister described as dangerous and irresponsible.
© Provided by National Post A vial and syringe are seen in front of a displayed Pfizer and Biontech logo in this illustration taken Jan. 11, 2021.
Leo Grasset, whose DirtyBiology YouTube channel has more than a million subscribers, said on his @dirtybiology Twitter account that he had been offered money to criticize the Pfizer shot.
“I have received a partnership proposal to bust the Pfizer vaccine in video. Huge budget, a client who wants to remain anonymous … if you see videos about this, you will know that it is a set-up,” he tweeted.
He added that the address of London-based agency that had contacted him was a fake.
It was not clear how many people had received such requests, where they originated or why they targeted the Pfizer vaccine, the most commonly administered in France, a country with a tradition of vaccine skepticism. About one-third of the 23 million population has received at least one dose.
Pfizer did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Pfizer and German partner BioNTech last November became the first drug manufacturers to report successful initial data from a large coronavirus vaccine clinical trial.
In April, a European Union report said Russian and Chinese media were systematically seeking to sow mistrust in Western COVID-19 vaccines in their disinformation campaigns aimed at the West.
Leo Grasset, whose DirtyBiology YouTube channel has more than a million subscribers, said on his @dirtybiology Twitter account that he had been offered money to criticize the Pfizer shot.
“I have received a partnership proposal to bust the Pfizer vaccine in video. Huge budget, a client who wants to remain anonymous … if you see videos about this, you will know that it is a set-up,” he tweeted.
He added that the address of London-based agency that had contacted him was a fake.
It was not clear how many people had received such requests, where they originated or why they targeted the Pfizer vaccine, the most commonly administered in France, a country with a tradition of vaccine skepticism. About one-third of the 23 million population has received at least one dose.
Pfizer did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Pfizer and German partner BioNTech last November became the first drug manufacturers to report successful initial data from a large coronavirus vaccine clinical trial.
In April, a European Union report said Russian and Chinese media were systematically seeking to sow mistrust in Western COVID-19 vaccines in their disinformation campaigns aimed at the West.
Pfizer starts testing pneumococcal shot along with third dose of COVID-19 vaccine
One of the operators of “Et ca se dit medecin” (And They Call Themselves Doctors), which has about 30,000 followers on Twitter and 90,000 on Instagram, also said on RMC TV he had been offered money to discredit the Pfizer vaccine. Sami Ouladitto, a comedian with 400,000 subscribers, had also been contacted.
“I do not know where this comes from, from France or abroad,” French Health Minister Olivier Veran said on BFM TV on Tuesday. “It is pathetic, it is dangerous, it is irresponsible and it does not work.”
It was difficult to trace the emails, which apparently came from a London-based agency called Fazze, Le Monde reported, saying Fazze had never been registered in the United Kingdom, but may be in the Virgin Islands.
However, the agency’s CEO had a LinkedIn profile indicating it operates out of Moscow, Le Monde said.
According to France24.com , those they spoke to who were targeted by the campaign — most of who are active in the health and science fields — said an apparently U.K.-based communications agency offered them “a partnership” on behalf of a client with “a colossal budget” but who wanted to remain anonymous and also to keep any deal secret.
According to the BBC , Grasset was urged not to use such words as “advertising” or “sponsored video” if he were to agree to the partnership offer.
He said the email indicated he was to “present the material as your own independent view.”
It also asked him to spread a claim that the death rate among the vaccinated by Pfizer is almost three times higher than among those who have received AstraZeneca — which is false.
“Incredible,” he tweeted. “The address of the London agency that contacted me is fake. They never had a presence there, it’s a laser surgery centre. All staff (of the agency) have weird LinkedIn profiles” which had now disappeared, but he had noticed that “everybody there has worked in Russia.”
See new TweetsTweetLéo Grasset@dirtybiologyMay 24C'est étrange.J'ai reçu une proposition de partenariat qui consiste à déglinguer le vaccin Pfizer en vidéo. Budget colossal, client qui veut rester incognito et il faut cacher la sponso.Éthique/20. Si vous voyez des vidéos là dessus vous saurez que c'est une opé, du coup.Léo Grasset@dirtybiologyMay 24Je sais que c'est du pain béni pour les complotistes, mais bon ça me semble important de montrer que vos youtubeurs/tiktokeurs favoris peuvent être les porte-paroles de ce qui semble être un conflit commercial dans ce cas précis (I guess)
The agency allegedly offered the equivalent of US$2,450 to influencers.
The European Union has also approved Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, but not Russia’s Sputnik nor China’s Sinopharm.
— with additional reporting from France24.com
The European Union has also approved Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, but not Russia’s Sputnik nor China’s Sinopharm.
— with additional reporting from France24.com
Social media heavyweights wooed for Pfizer smear campaign
LE PECQ, France (AP) — 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 Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine with negative fake stories.
LE PECQ, France (AP) — 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 Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine with negative fake stories.
© Provided by The Canadian Press
French YouTuber Léo Grasset was among those contacted. He said Tuesday that he was offered a potentially lucrative but also hush-hush 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 sizable audiences on Twitter, Instagram and other platforms 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.”
Specifically, Anton asked for a 45- to 60-second 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.
“This is a monopoly and is causing harm to public health," Anton claimed of EU's purchases.
He refused in a follow-up email to divulge who is financing the disinformation campaign, saying: “The client prefers to remain incognito.”
Grasset shared the email exchanges with The Associated Press.
The smear effort drew a withering response from French Health Minister Olivier Veran.
“It's pathetic, it's dangerous, it's irresponsible and it doesn't work," he said.
The person who contacted Grasset said he works for an advertising agency called Fazze. A website for Fazze used to give a London address but that had been scrubbed from the site on Tuesday. Companies House, where British firms are registered, has no record of Fazze.
The AP sent emails requesting comment to a contact address listed on the website and to the email address used by Anton. Neither elicited an immediate response.
Anton's emails included a password-protected link to a set of instructions in error-strewn English for the would-be campaign.
It said influencers who agreed to take part shouldn't say that they were being sponsored and should instead “present the material as your own independent view.”
Other instructions were that influencers should say “that mainstream media ignores this theme” and should ask why governments are purchasing Pfizer.
A trainee doctor in southern France with tens of thousands of followers who was also approached for the smear effort told French broadcaster BFMTV that he was offered more than 2,000 euros ($3,000) for a 30-second video post.
Grasset said that given the large size of his YouTube following, he possibly might have earned tens of thousands of euros (dollars) had he agreed to take part.
Instead, he wrote back that “I can't work for a client that won't give its name and who asks me to hide the partnership.”
“Too many red flags,” Grasset said in an interview with AP. “I decided not to do it.”
“They wanted me to talk about the Pfizer vaccine in a way that would be detrimental to the Pfizer vaccine reputation,” he said.
He said the disinformation effort drives home the need for people "to be super, super cautious” about what they see online.
“We creators on YouTube, on internet, Instagram, et cetera, we are at the center of something going on like an information war," he said. "We, as creators, need to set our standards really high because it's, I think, just the beginning."
___
AP journalist Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.
French YouTuber Léo Grasset was among those contacted. He said Tuesday that he was offered a potentially lucrative but also hush-hush 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 sizable audiences on Twitter, Instagram and other platforms 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.”
Specifically, Anton asked for a 45- to 60-second 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.
“This is a monopoly and is causing harm to public health," Anton claimed of EU's purchases.
He refused in a follow-up email to divulge who is financing the disinformation campaign, saying: “The client prefers to remain incognito.”
Grasset shared the email exchanges with The Associated Press.
The smear effort drew a withering response from French Health Minister Olivier Veran.
“It's pathetic, it's dangerous, it's irresponsible and it doesn't work," he said.
The person who contacted Grasset said he works for an advertising agency called Fazze. A website for Fazze used to give a London address but that had been scrubbed from the site on Tuesday. Companies House, where British firms are registered, has no record of Fazze.
The AP sent emails requesting comment to a contact address listed on the website and to the email address used by Anton. Neither elicited an immediate response.
Anton's emails included a password-protected link to a set of instructions in error-strewn English for the would-be campaign.
It said influencers who agreed to take part shouldn't say that they were being sponsored and should instead “present the material as your own independent view.”
Other instructions were that influencers should say “that mainstream media ignores this theme” and should ask why governments are purchasing Pfizer.
A trainee doctor in southern France with tens of thousands of followers who was also approached for the smear effort told French broadcaster BFMTV that he was offered more than 2,000 euros ($3,000) for a 30-second video post.
Grasset said that given the large size of his YouTube following, he possibly might have earned tens of thousands of euros (dollars) had he agreed to take part.
Instead, he wrote back that “I can't work for a client that won't give its name and who asks me to hide the partnership.”
“Too many red flags,” Grasset said in an interview with AP. “I decided not to do it.”
“They wanted me to talk about the Pfizer vaccine in a way that would be detrimental to the Pfizer vaccine reputation,” he said.
He said the disinformation effort drives home the need for people "to be super, super cautious” about what they see online.
“We creators on YouTube, on internet, Instagram, et cetera, we are at the center of something going on like an information war," he said. "We, as creators, need to set our standards really high because it's, I think, just the beginning."
___
AP journalist Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.
France praises YouTubers over foiled Pfizer vaccine smear
LE PECQ, France (AP) — France's government offered strong praise Wednesday to YouTubers and other social media influencers who resisted a mysterious effort to recruit them for a smear campaign to spread disinformation to their millions of young followers about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.
Multiple France-based influencers with sizable audiences on Twitter, Instagram and other platforms said they were contacted with offers of hush-hush payments to make bogus claims about supposed deadly Pfizer vaccine risks.
YouTuber Léo Grasset, among those contacted, said the shady advertising agency that sought to recruit him “wanted me to talk about the Pfizer vaccine in a way that would be detrimental to the Pfizer vaccine reputation.”
He and others said they refused. They got a thumbs up Wednesday from French government spokesman Gabriel Attal.
“I want to salute the great responsibility of these young YouTubers or influencers who not only didn’t fall for this and didn’t, through cupidity, allow themselves to be manipulated but also denounced it publicly," Attal said. “I really want to salute that.”
Grasset, who has 1.1 million subscribers on YouTube, said he and other social media and internet content-creators are “at the center of something going on like an information war.”
The person who contacted Grasset identified himself as Anton and said his ad 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.”
Specifically, “Anton” asked for a 45- to 60-second 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.
He refused in a follow-up email to divulge who is financing the campaign, saying: “The client prefers to remain incognito.”
Instructions he sent also said that if influencers agreed to take part then they shouldn’t say that they were being sponsored and should "present the material as your own independent view.”
Grasset shared the email exchanges with The Associated Press. He said that given his large YouTube following, he might have earned tens of thousands of euros (dollars) had he agreed to take part.
Instead, he wrote back that “I can’t work for a client that won’t give its name and who asks me to hide the partnership.”
The AP sent emails requesting comment to a contact address listed on ad agency's website and to the email address used by “Anton.” Neither elicited a response.
The Associated Press was not immediately able to determine who hosts the website of Fazze.com. Internet records show that the San Francisco firm Cloudflare provides cybersecurity protection for the site against denial-of-service and other attacks, effectively masking its host to public scrutiny. A Cloudflare spokesman said the U.S. company does not host Fazze.com and did not say who does.
Social media users in Germany also claimed to have been contacted for the disinformation campaign. German authorities said officials were discussing the incident at the international level.
“There is an exchange between the European authorities concerned,” Christofer Burger, a spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry, told reporters in Berlin.
“They are part of a network that has regular contact about cases of disinformation and also about how to deal with individual incidents,” he said, without elaborating.
___
Frank Bajak in Boston and Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report.
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