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Since early January, some people online have been sharing a photo of a dummy in a hospital bed, claiming it was used in a TV report by French broadcaster BFM in order to trick people about the severity of the latest wave of Covid in France. They say that hospitals aren’t really full, and that they’re packing beds with mannequins to make the situation seem worse. But in reality, these images come from a hospital simulation in Quebec, and they were never aired on BFMTV.
“France: hospitals are so saturated with the omicron variant that there is not even time to put the arms to the mannequins for the media…” This was the caption above an image shared on an anti-vaccine Facebook page on January 6.
The photo shows a mannequin, laying on a hospital bed, separated from the medical team by a protective barrier. On the top left of the image, there’s the logo for French news channel BFMTV, and on the bottom a banner saying “Castex tested positive for Covid-19”, referring to the French prime minister’s positive diagnosis on November 22, 2021.
The photo has been circulating on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in English, as well as in Portuguese and Polish.
Posts like these had already been debunked by French media, like AFP Factuel, but began spreading again, this time for an international audience in various languages.
A demonstration video in a Quebec hospital
As explained by AFP Factuel, the original image can be found with a reverse image search using the search engine Yandex. The photo of the mannequin appears online without the BFM logo. Other images show the same scene, from another angle, with a logo saying…
Source : france24
