After an appearance at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in May 2022, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla is given statements.
Conspiracy theorist circulates manipulated clip on social media. The fake video is said to prove that the company is working to drastically reduce the world population.
“I think it’s a dream come true that me and my leadership team had when we started 2019. In the first week we met in California in January to lay out the plans for the next five years and one of them was to reduce the world population by 50 percent by 2023. Today I think that dream will become reality.”
But the Pfizer boss never made this statement. What’s behind the fake video?
The clip is a edited video. The original will be published on May 25 by the World Economic Forum on Youtube.
In the unabridged version of the video, the passage in question deals with a completely different topic:
“The first week we met in California in January to set out plans for the next five years, and one of them was to reduce the number of people who can’t afford our medicines by 50 percent by 2023. Today I think that dream will become reality.“
The case makes it clear that anyone who appears in public and is filmed must expect that their words will then be twisted in their mouths on social media.
How do we check videos for manipulation in the editorial office? It is important to look at the details. The individual frames of a video often reveal whether a video has been edited. We take a close look at each image and enlarge individual sections. Indications of a fake are, for example: lack of motion blur, unnatural shadows or editing errors. The general rule at stern is: Seriousness before speed. We always double-check facts and material thoroughly before publishing them. For this we work with the cross-editorial “Team Verification” together with RTL, NTV, RTL2, Radio NRW.