Did Zagreb Mayor Tomislav Tomašević import mosquitos to transmit diseases and vaccinate people with mRNA vaccines? No, that's not true: 100,000 sterile male mosquitoes imported from Italy were released in Zagreb as a way to fight a tiger mosquito infestation. They were not imported to spread diseases or to vaccinate people.
The claim appeared in a TikTok video (archived here) published by user katarina4618 on November 11, 2023. It opened (translated from Croatian to English by Lead Stories staff):
The question is why he imported mosquitoes, to transmit diseases or to vaccinate us with mRNA vaccines, with which not all of us voluntarily wanted to be vaccinated...
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Sun Nov 19 19:58:50 2023 UTC)
Croatia's Teaching Institute for Public Health Dr. Andrija Štampar began a pilot project to control tiger mosquitoes using the sterile insect technique, a biological method of mosquito control. It's carried out by releasing sterile male mosquitoes into the natural population so that they mate with wild female mosquitoes of the same species. The result is that the females create and lay eggs that will not develop into new mosquitos. Zagreb imported 100,000 sterile mosquitoes from Bologna, Italy, and the first release of sterile mosquitoes took place on June 22, 2023, when 50,000 sterile male tiger mosquitoes were released in the Cvjetno Naselje neighborhood in Zagreb.
TikTok user katarina4618 has posted other conspiracy theories, such as claiming that Pfizer vaccines contain graphene oxide (archived here), global warming is a lie (archived here), and that 5G activates pathogens from COVID-19 vaccines in the human body (archived here). Lead Stories previously debunked the claim by this account that the HAARP facility is in Petrova Gora in Croatia.
