Gabriel Attal on quarantine for UK visitors, Pfizer smear

France is going to impose a mandatory quarantine on visitors from the UK to prevent the spread of a worrying virus variant first detected in India, an official said on Wednesday.

French government spokesman Gabriel Attal said France is following procedures that other EU countries like Germany are imposing.

He didn't say when the quarantine will be introduced but added that more information would be released shortly.

From Sunday, Germany started requiring people arriving from the UK to go into quarantine for 14 days.

Attal also offered a resounding thumbs up to YouTubers and other social media influencers who resisted a mysterious effort to recruit them for a smear campaign against the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine.

"I want to salute the great responsibility of these young YouTubers or influencers," the spokesman said, praising them for not falling "into this trap, did not accept by greed to be manipulated" and for having publicly denounced it.

Multiple France-based influencers with sizeable audiences on Twitter, Instagram and other platforms said they were contacted with offers of hush-hush payments to make bogus claims about supposed deadly Pfizer vaccine risks.

YouTuber Léo Grasset, who is among those contacted, said the shady advertising agency that sought to recruit him wanted him to talk about the Pfizer vaccine "in a way that would be detrimental to the Pfizer vaccine reputation."

He and others said they refused.