As the distribution of vaccines in the United States increased, so did the disinformation blitz targeting black communities.
A new video of anti-vaccination activists released online on Thursday adds to what experts call an effort to “turn” the massive damage that Covid-19 has done to black communities into a weapon.
The video was released by anti-vaccination activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was recently banned from Instagram for spreading the Covid-19 vaccine conspiracy theories, and Republican mega-donor David Centner. The hour-long film relies heavily on the US Public Health Service’s Syphilis Study in Tuskegee and promotes false claims that Covid-19’s vaccination efforts are part of a larger sinister experiment in black communities.
A video trailer posted on Instagram has already received over 160,000 views on Thursday morning.
Brandi Collins-Dexter, a disinformation researcher and fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said the documentary’s notorious figures and false narratives were recognizable. She noted that the film’s incompatible narratives sought to take advantage of the pain felt by black communities.
“They went on to say that Covid is not a problem or problem to openly acknowledge that black people are disproportionately impacted by it, then turning to a diffuse logic behind why you shouldn’t vaccinate,” she said.
Anti-vaccination activists have been targeting marginalized groups for years – holding demonstrations in black churches in Harlem, New York; Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York; and Somali communities in Minnesota, even with a measles outbreak. Many of his messages invoked the language of civil rights, with mandatory school vaccination being framed as an “injustice” for the black community.
The video released on Thursday is no different, said Collins-Dexter. She noted that the film’s most obvious manipulation tactic was to compare vaccines to the Tuskegee Study – an unethical federal experiment that retained the diagnosis of syphilis in black individuals and denied them treatment.
Among the false recycled narratives from other anti-vaccine films, including that childhood vaccines cause autism, he offers conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Interspersed with these, however, are renowned doctors and historians who speak about the real history of medical racism in America, represented by the Tuskegee Study and the first gynecological experimentation on enslaved black women without anesthesia.
“The danger of disinformation is not always just a lie, but it is a distortion of the truth to reach a specific end,” said Collins-Dexter. “And then, when you say ‘Tuskegee experiment’ to black people, it will automatically mean something that seems real and that opens the door to a kind of manipulation that makes the viewer say, ‘Oh, they’ve done this before, obviously they would this again. ‘But they don’t contextualize what that means. “
Covid-19’s impact on black communities made headlines as the virus ravaged the country. Apparently, the disease and its economic consequences affected blacks more than others through health, unemployment and education. But experts noted that the negative impact is not due to biology, but to systemic racism. As a result, black communities expressed hesitation about being vaccinated due to the country’s long history of medical racism. Black doctors and medical service providers have been working for months to build confidence in medicine in black communities and recognize the damage from the past that generated distrust in the first place.
Now, for blacks, the situation has begun to shift from a question of trust to a question of access. Blacks are generally less skeptical about treatment, but poor access has prevented many from being vaccinated. Recent research shows that vaccine hesitation among blacks is decreasing. A Civiqs survey found that white Americans say they are less likely to receive the vaccine than blacks and Latino Americans. Research shows that hesitation about the vaccine is greater among white Republicans. Still, in more than a dozen states, whites are being vaccinated at much higher rates than blacks, according to Scientific American.
The video – the newest in a series of anti-vaccine propaganda films produced or promoted by Kennedy this year – was distributed by the Kennedy organization, Children’s Health Defense, amid a turbulent implementation of the vaccine and concerns about who will have access to treatment and when . After signing up to receive a notification for the film’s release, a message on the website asked visitors to make a donation to Children’s Health Defense.
Centner, a Miami philanthropist and executive producer of the film, is not known for his involvement in anti-vaccination causes. He and his wife, Leila Centner, are the founders of the Centner Academy, a private school that prides itself on not complying with vaccination mandates. The school hosted two lectures in January in which Kennedy shared his ill-informed anti-vaccination views with a private audience and met with children, according to shared posts on Leila Centner’s Facebook page. Centners did not return a request for comment.
The Centners donated nearly $ 500,000 to the Republican National Committee and the state Republican parties in the past year alone and donated $ 11,200 – the maximum allowed – to then President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign.
Other producers include Tony Muhammad, a minister of the Nation of Islam, who falsely claimed that childhood vaccines are “genetically modified” to harm colored children, and Kevin Jenkins, the CEO of New Jersey’s Urban Global Health Alliance, who has been a constant presence at anti-vaccination rallies and promoted a disinformation campaign for Covid-19, promoted by the conservative group America’s Frontline Doctors, supported by the tea party.
“The anti-xxx industry sees this pandemic, which tragically claimed millions of lives, as a market opportunity to increase its number of followers,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a non-profit organization that tracks misinformation online. “They developed a sophisticated communication strategy to create mistrust of Covid’s vaccine and reach new audiences, including adapting their messages to ethnic minority communities.”
A recent report by the Digital Hate Fighting Center presented the Covid-19 anti-vaccination movement “manual” based on a conference where activists outlined their plans to undermine confidence in the upcoming Covid-19 vaccines.
“Our latest report found that antivaxxers are even using Facebook groups to train their activists to dissuade African Americans from being vaccinated, and this film appears to be the latest example of that approach,” said Ahmed. “Technology companies have a responsibility to deny their services to super-spreaders of vaccine lies and not to allow their platforms to be used to reach potentially African-American and Hispanic audiences with potentially fatal inaccurate information.”
