Did Jacques Attali, an adviser to the late French President Francois Mitterrand, call for a pandemic that would target "weak" human beings for elimination in 1981? No, that's not true: The claim is a fabrication that has been circulating on social media since at least April 2021, when the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing. A new iteration has now cropped up in Hungarian.
The claim appeared in a TikTok video (archived here) on May 2, 2023, under the title "An Interview from 1981!" It purports to show the text of an interview Attali gave to French author Michel Salomon for his book, "The Future of Life," published in France as "L'Avenir de la Vie" in 1981. The highlighted portion reads:
We will find or cause something a pandemic targeting certain people, a real economic crisis or not, a virus affecting the old or the fat, it doesn't matter, the weak will succumb to it, the fearful and stupid will believe in it and seek treatment, we will have made sure that treatment is in place, treatment that will be the solution. The selection of idiots then takes care of itself: You go to the slaughter by yourself.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Thu May 4 11:55:08 2023 UTC)
The implied claim is that Attali had been plotting to unleash the COVID-19 virus as a means of culling populations he deems undesirable, nearly four decades before the pandemic struck. COVID-19 has the greatest potential to cause serious illness or death among people who are elderly, overweight, or suffer from chronic health conditions, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
However, Attali never mentioned any plan to depopulate the planet in his interview for the "Future of Life," a copy of which was obtained by AFP Fact Check for a debunk published on June 30, 2021. The closest Attali ever comes to such a statement is when he says, "As soon as a person gets to be older than sixty or sixty-five, and his productivity and profitability begin to slip, he costs society dearly," and "Actually, from the viewpoint of the cost to society, it is much preferable that the human machine abruptly stop functioning than that it deteriorate very gradually," according to AFP.
Attali affirmed to AFP that he had never said such a thing. "This text is completely made up," he said. "It is in no way close to the initial excerpt. It is like saying that I wrote 'Mein Kampf.'"
In December 2022, Lead Stories fact-checked a previous incarnation of this claim, which said Attali had envisioned a pandemic in his own 1981 book, "Verbatim." In fact, Attali did not publish the first volume of "Verbatim" until 1993, and the book never discusses a plan to depopulate the world by means of a deadly virus.
