Toulouse: these antivax panels denounced by doctors and condemned by the prefect
At the beginning of July, 4X3 advertising posters denouncing the supposed dangerousness of vaccines against Covid flourish in town. Propaganda difficult to counter.
They have their website which has flourished in the virtual sphere of our computers, and they are now attacking the public space, in the real world… Since the beginning of the summer, a few 4X3 billboards have appeared in the streets of Toulouse to distill the antivax message of the Réinfo Covid and Réinfo Santé collectives under the medical guarantee of a certain Independent Scientific Council (CSI). The tone is alarmist.
“Their health is worth more than experimental vaccines. One in 100 serious side effects and what if it was your child? asks a poster. When another variation denounces “a cardiovascular accident every 100 injections”. This brings out of his hinges the doctor from Fronton, Jérôme Marty, president of the French Union for Free Medicine (UFML). “The proof of the inanity of these figures is that if we take them at face value, given the millions of vaccines that have been administered, 1.5 million incidents should have been dismissed. Fortunately, we are a long way from that. This communication is misleading and manipulative.
Not so easy to remove these famous posters…
This media offensive “of disinformation and untruths”, also shocked the council of the College of Physicians of Haute-Garonne, whose president, Stéphane Oustric, alerted the prefect to put an end to “this defilement of our city “. Except that it is not so easy to make the famous posters disappear. “It is complicated for the town hall of Toulouse because it is not in our field of action. Advertising is on private property we have no means of action, says one at the Capitol. What poses a problem is at the level of the content of the advertising. We could intervene and remove this poster only if we are on a major security case with a disturbance to public order”. A concept open to interpretation. “We are on a private domain, but the message is public and endangers the population”, protests Jérôme Marty.
The prefecture is examining legal avenues for prosecution
On the side of the advertising network which accepted the antivax communication campaign, the company LPDS Luchetta Poster, based in Meurthe-et-Moselle, very far from the Pink City, the speech is assumed. “Insofar as there is no political message or pornographic content, we are not illegal,” we explain in substance. Money has no smell.
For the time being, Etienne Guyot, the prefect of Haute-Garonne, and the Occitanie Regional Health Agency, “condemned in accordance with these posters which aim to disseminate false information on a crucial public health subject”. The prefect asked the security forces to draw up reports of findings in order to determine very precisely the locations of these posters. The public authorities are examining “the legal avenues likely to be pursued against the authors of these posters and those who allowed them to be affixed”.