A vaccination campaign … and disinformation

Vaccines against Covid-19 make you magnetic. Those using messenger RNA technology are “cytotoxic”. Several vaccination operations organized for the press are actually staged … So many “fake news” particularly popular on social networks for a few months. Because since the start of the vaccination campaign against Covid-19, a year ago, another campaign has been carried out online: that of disinformation. With only one goal, to question the effectiveness and the validity of the vaccination.

At the start of the year, the fact-checking section of 20 Minutes invites you to become actors and actresses in the fight against “fake news”. In addition to the visuals to share on social media posted on Monday, we sifted through several trends in misinformation about vaccination. History to decipher the mechanisms of this fake news and to start 2022 on the right foot.

Filmed and disputed vaccinations

You have no doubt noticed it: throughout the past year, some Internet users have questioned the very reality of the vaccination act. Do you remember Margaret Keenan? On December 8, 2020, the 90-year-old Briton became a pioneer: she was the first person in her country to receive a dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. However, it did not take long for the reality of the injection to be questioned on the Internet, using a screenshot from CNN, which did not prove that the retiree had not been vaccinated.

These same accusations of staging will return in March when Jean Castex will be vaccinated in front of the cameras a few weeks later. Like other politicians around the world, Christian Estrosi will also be accused, in April, of having been falsely vaccinated against Covid-19.

This trend “is quite new”, notes Françoise Salvadori, lecturer in immunology at the University of Burgundy. The questioning of the reality of the vaccination act “is linked to video information and to the image”, adds the co-author ofAntivax. Vaccine resistance from the 18th century to the present day*. One of the oldest examples could go back to Roselyne Bachelot’s vaccination against the H1N1 influenza in 2009. “It seems to me that at the time, it was the first time that we claimed that what we had injected her physiological serum, that it was not the real vaccine, ”recalls the researcher.

Accusations of vaccine toxicity are “eternal”

Vaccines have also been singled out for their composition. Messenger RNA vaccines have been mistakenly suspected of being able to transform DNA, or to be “cytotoxic”. An assertion that does not correspond to scientific data, as recalled 20 Minutes
in this article in June.

These accusations of vaccine toxicity are “eternal”, underlines François Salvadori. “The poisoning myth, that these vaccines are there to make us sick, has been around from the start. »When at the beginning of the 19th century, the British doctor Edward Jenner develops his vaccine against smallpox, having the idea of ​​inoculating the vaccine, present in cows, “there is a whole mythology on the idea according to which one would perhaps turn into cows . There were cartoons that showed little cows and little horns growing on the backs and buttocks of the vaccinated. “

In the 21st century, this “poisoning myth” was fueled by the publication of European pharmacovigilance data. Are deaths recorded by health authorities among vaccinated people? Regardless of their real cause, databases are brandished as evidence of vaccine toxicity.

These fears are still old, notes Françoise Salvadori: “There were campaigns in England who opposed compulsory vaccination, because England was the first to have made it compulsory in 1863. The first Anti-vaccine associations have published photographs of dead children, with the date of the child’s death and the date of his vaccination. “In 2021, these are lists of airline pilots or athletes who have massively circulated online, without the link between their death and vaccination being established.

* Published by Vendémiaire editions on January 3, 2019, the book was written with Laurent-Henri Vignaud.