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Something Lighthearted For A Change

Youtube Disclaimers

You’ve all seen these disclaimers that pop up whenever you navigate to a Youtube video that might contain dangerous COVID-19 misinformation.

This is what you usually see right below the video frame, when you are located in Germany:

This is how Google translates the disclaimer into English:

Until a friend told me about this earlier today I had never bothered clicking the link labelled “Further information”. It directed me to the url “infektionsschutz.de” (infection protection), which is run by the German Health Ministry.

A familiar logo

The logo they are using looked strangely familiar…

…but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

The friend who asked me to click the link helped me out. It’s a slightly modified version of the Umbrella Corporation’s logo.

What Is The Umbrella Corporation?

For those not familiar with the Resident Evil video game series from the 90s, here is an excerpt from the Resident Evil Wiki.

The Umbrella Corporation was a multinational conglomerate with subsidiaries active in a variety of industries from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Umbrella's large array of subsidiaries was […] purposely built to cover up illegal activities.

Soon after the opening of its pharmaceutical subsidiary […] Umbrella began developing biological weaponry for militaries across the world as part of a worldwide conspiracy to accumulate deadly viruses directly prohibited by the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Umbrella Pharmaceuticals was able to cover their true intentions by researching vaccines for the same viruses as a front.

Umbrella's true goal was not, in fact, a capitalistic urge for monopolization of a lucrative industry. It was eugenics.

What a great find. I thank André Graf for pointing this out to me.

I’ve already written an email to the communication agency Hauptweg-Nebenwege to find out who the designer is.

Whoever came up with this deserves a personal thank-you letter, because this absolutely made my day.