So the story goes "12 rolls of industrial shrink wrap, 8 messengers, 1 mission", and the mission is to wrap the statue of liberties head in shrink wrap to spread the message that ALPHA-1 is a genetic disorder that makes it hard to breathe. iReport at CNN seems to think it's real. The actual wrapping of the statue of liberty, that is. The awareness campaign is real, but they never went to the statue of liberty, other than to film it with the shaky handheld look needed to fake "authenticity" in these types of stunts.

From what I can gather this is all some publicity stunt to raise awareness for Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency, a rare lung disease. Lung Disease…Suffocation…Plastic… Statue of Liberty. Yearning to breathe free… Got it.

See, on .alpha-1incident.com they write "In early January, under the cover of darkness, eight rogue wrappers crowded into a small sea craft and ventured out to Liberty Island..." yet there are no news reports from early January showing a defaced statue of Liberty. In other words, it never happened, other than in post-production. We've seen this sort of stunt before, remember the Ecko ad where they tagged "still free" on air force one in 2006? Yeah, that didn't really happen either.

update: to be perfectly clear - The domain ALPHA-1INCIDENT.COM is owned by DIGITAL DRAFTFCB HEALTHCARE, and the technical and administrative contact is Andrew Wint, andrew.wint---draftfcb.com. This stunt is done in post not for real.