But of course, we have made sure to change the picture now," Hanna Fellenius, a spokeswoman for Stockholm Region told Reuters. "We did not know it was a meme until we noticed this. "Harold" briefly fronted the website where Stockholm city residents can book their COVID-19 vaccines after the city used a stock photo of Arato from a photo agency database. Those images of a grey-bearded man wearing a smile but with sad, pained eyes became an internet meme dubbed "Hide the Pain Harold" as they were shared and reused with new, humorous captions by millions online. Harold is actually Hungarian man Andras Arato, who in 20 posed as a model for stock photographs. A Mascreenshot shows a part of a government website where Swedes can book COVID-19 vaccinations, featuring the "Hide the Pain Harold" meme. But I’m not actually a sad guy – I think I’m rather a happy one.A health authority in Sweden unwittingly used 'Hide the Pain Harold' - one of the internet's most-recognised figures - as the face of its COVID-19 vaccination booking website, officials said on Tuesday evening, adding the image had now been removed. Now, it’s role play: I’m Hide the Pain Harold. I did a bit of public speaking then, at conferences and lectures, but that was very different from appearing on television talkshows and YouTube videos. I’m proud that something more has come out of the last 10 years than just an idiotic smile. I am the face of a campaign for a mental health service in Hungary, similar to the Samaritans in the UK. We want it to be more than just a sad smile. I’ve never enjoyed a fame like that before sometimes it was frightening. Every time I walked down the street a crowd would gather, so they gave me bodyguards. Last month, I travelled to Chile and Colombia for some TV appearances that was the first time I felt like a real celebrity. Last year, I took 20 flights from Budapest to destinations all over the world: Europe, Russia and, increasingly, South America. I’m the face of Totum, the British discount card run by the National Union of Students – they got me to wear a bucket hat. The Hungarian hard rock band Cloud 9+ have a song called Hide The Pain, with me in the video. The German mail-order giant Otto flew me out to make commercials for them. A football website flew me to England to make a video about Manchester City I got to tour the ground and watch them play a Champions League game. People ask me to talk about my story, to demonstrate the power of memes. The fee for that commercial changed my wife’s mind about the meme. In one of the adverts, I travelled to Germany to buy a used car and it broke down halfway home if I had bought the same car through their company, the brand claimed, it wouldn’t have happened. I was given a role in a television commercial for a Hungarian car dealer. People noticed that I had taken ownership of the meme and got in contact to offer me work. So, in 2017, I created my own Facebook fan page and updated it with videos and stories from my travels. Some kind of brand had been made out of me and I would have been a fool not to make use of it. I knew that it was impossible to stop people making memes, but it still annoyed me that Facebook pages, some with hundreds of thousands of followers, were using my photograph as their profile picture, and pretending to be me. Still smiling through… Photograph: StockLite/Shutterstock
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