MARCH 29, 2021 HENRY MILLERHUMAN EVENTS
Anyone active on social media is aware that there is a great deal of passionate but ill-founded opposition to vaccination, including to the new COVID-19 vaccines. How could that be? Physicians and the public health establishment are constantly promoting vaccination, especially as we try to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic.
It turns out that the anti-vaccine sentiment is the product of what can only be described as an industry whose principal protagonists are an organized group of professional propagandists. As recently reported in the science journal Nature, they are people “running multi-million-dollar organizations, incorporated mainly in the USA, with as many as 60 staff each.”
Moreover, the source of much of the misinformation about vaccines comes from an unobvious source: the Russian government’s propaganda apparatus, which cultivates and exploits foreign anti-vaccine “useful idiots,” causing palpable harm to Americans and citizens of other Western countries.
As I’ve previously described, Russia regularly conducts health-related disinformation and propaganda campaigns intended to humiliate or disparage the country’s foreign enemies. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union concocted an elaborate disinformation scheme to blame the appearance of HIV and AIDS on U.S. military research. They first planted the story in a sympathetic Indian newspaper, then followed it up with other fake stories that cited the initial report.
A 2018 U.S. Senate-commissioned analysis by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity firm, confirmed that Russia’s infamous troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, conducts “modern information warfare” against its adversaries. Renee DiResta, the research director of the firm, described the IRA’s battle plan as a “cross-platform attack that made use of numerous features on each social network and that spanned the entire social ecosystem.”
A study published by academics in 2018, “Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate,” found that thousands of Russian social media accounts were spreading anti-vaccine messaging. From an examination of almost two million tweets posted between 2014 and 2017, the researchers found that Russian troll accounts were significantly more likely to tweet about vaccination than were Twitter users generally. They noted that Russian tweets like, “Apparently only the elite get ‘clean’ #vaccines. And what do we, normal ppl, get?!” seem intended to exacerbate socioeconomic tensions in the United States.
Russia is at it again now, in earnest. Using online publications to raise concerns about the rapidity of the coronavirus vaccines’ development and their safety, they have been conducting an aggressive campaign to undermine confidence in the Pfizer-BioNTech and other Western coronavirus vaccines.
https://medecon.org/russias-anti-vaccine-propaganda-is-tantamount-to-a-declaration-of-war/
