If you have one or more social media accounts, chances are you’ve seen Karim’s video. On December 14, the cameras of AFP, the France press agency, filmed in his intensive care bed, in Montreuil, Abdelkrim Azzaoui, known as Karim, suffering from Covid. This is where he expresses his regrets for not having been vaccinated. The video is posted online by AFP and Karim is the target of many false claims, especially from conspiracy figures. This man died of the consequences of the Covid on December 20. But even after his death, he will be the victim of a conspiracy theory, that of the “false” deaths of the Covid which is circulating a lot at the moment.
What has evolved in the antivax conspiracy between the start of the Covid vaccine campaign a little over a year ago and today? First the leading figures of the movement, such as Professor Christian Perronne, whose intervention on January 12, 2022 during a public debate in the Parliament of Luxembourg became a viral video on the internet. Eight minutes of a speech filled with false or even misleading information.
The very recent case Spotify versus Neil Young is emblematic of a problem that has taken up a lot of space in recent months, that of the moderation of audio content and therefore in particular of podcasts. But the problem is the same on the “spaces” of Twitter, where groups of people can express without moderation all kinds of baseless claims around the vaccine.
Another development in the anti-vaccine conspiratorial sphere, radicalization and an amplification of violence. Threats and attacks from scientists, doctors, or elected officials. Last January, a crackdown took place. Two men and six women were arrested in Moselle, Rhône, Seine-et-Marne, Hauts-de-Seine and Finistère. They will appear in Paris for online moral harassment, after concerted and targeted actions on two parliamentarians and a doctor in 2021: these people are members of the anti-vaccine group “V_V”.
“The antivax conspiracy around the vaccine against Covid”, this is the 22nd episode of Complorama, with Rudy Reichstadt, director of Conspiracy Watch, and Tristan Mendès France, lecturer and member of the observatory of conspiracy, specialist in cultures digital. A podcast to be found on the franceinfo site, the Radio France application and several other platforms like Apple podcasts, Podcast Addict, Spotify, or Deezer.