Russia’s disinformation campaign aims to undermine confidence in Pfizer and other Covid-19 vaccines, US officials say

The sites emphasized the risk of side effects from vaccines, questioned its effectiveness and said the United States has accelerated the approval process for the Pfizer vaccine, among other false or misleading claims.

Although the number of readers of the vehicles is small, the American authorities say that they inject false narratives that can be extended by other Russian and international media.

“We can say that these channels are directly linked to Russian intelligence services,” said the Global Engagement Center official on the websites behind the disinformation campaign. “They are all foreign owned, based outside the United States. They vary widely in their reach, their tone, their audience, but they are all part of Russian propaganda and the disinformation ecosystem. ”

In addition, Russian state media and Russian government Twitter accounts have made open efforts to raise concerns about the cost and safety of the Pfizer vaccine, what experts outside the US government say is an effort to promote the sale of Pfizer. rival vaccine Sputnik V from Russia.

“The emphasis on blackening Pfizer is probably due to its status as the first vaccine other than Sputnik V to see mass use, resulting in a potentially greater threat to the dominance of the Sputnik market,” says an upcoming report by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a non-governmental organization that focuses on the danger that authoritarian governments pose to democracies and is part of the German Marshall Fund, an American think tank.

Foreign efforts to sow doubts about the vaccine explore deep anxieties about the efficacy and side effects of vaccines that were already prevalent in some communities in the United States and internationally. Concern about side effects is one of the main reasons for the vaccine’s hesitation, according to data from the US Census Bureau made public last month.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that Russian intelligence agencies were orchestrating articles against Western vaccines and said American officials were misrepresenting the broad international debate on vaccines as a Russian plot.

“It’s an absurd. Russian special services have nothing to do with any criticism of vaccines, ”said Peskov in a telephone interview from Moscow. “If we treat all negative publications against the Sputnik V vaccine as a result of the efforts of the American special services, we will go crazy because we see it every day, every hour and in all Anglo-Saxon media.”

The GEC State Department official said that four publications had direct links to Russian intelligence and were used by the Russian government to mislead international opinion on a number of issues.

New Eastern Outlook and Oriental Review, the official said, are directed and controlled by the SVR, or Russia’s foreign intelligence service. They present themselves as academic publications and are aimed at the Middle East, Asia and Africa, offering comments on the role of the United States in the world. The State Department said in an August report that the New Eastern Outlook was linked to “state-funded institutions” in Russia.

Another publication, News Front, is run by the FSB, a security service that has succeeded the KGB, the official said. It is based in Crimea, produces information in 10 languages ​​and had almost nine million page visits between February and April 2020, the official added. In August, the State Department was less explicit, saying that the News Front reportedly had links to Russia’s security services and Kremlin funding.

Rebel Inside, the fourth publication, was controlled by GRU, which is an intelligence directorate of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff. He covered riots and protests and now appears to be asleep, said the GEC official.

The State Department had not gone so far as to say that these media were controlled or guided by Russian intelligence agencies – a statement that generally depends on the United States’ secret intelligence.

A State Department spokesman did not provide specific evidence linking the publications to Russian intelligence, but said the assessment was “the result of a joint inter-agency conclusion”.

“Russian intelligence services have a direct responsibility for using these four platforms to spread propaganda and lies,” said the spokesman. “Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic last year, we have seen Russia’s disinformation ecosystem develop and spread false narratives around the crisis.”

News Front, New Eastern Outlook and Oriental Review did not respond to requests for comment.

Social media accounts affiliated with the four sites have been largely removed from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest,

although some accounts in other languages ​​remained active earlier this year.

Highlighting reports in the international media, a January story in the News Front highlighted the risk that a person receiving Pfizer or Moderna Inc.

Vaccines can contract Bell’s palsy, in which facial muscles are paralyzed, while a February article focuses on a man in California who said he tested positive for Covid-19 after receiving the vaccination from Pfizer.

In each case, Russian vehicles were repeating actual news, but neglecting contrary information about the general safety of the vaccine. Numerous studies and real-world data have shown that vaccines approved by the Food and Drug Administration are safe and effective, and hospitalizations and deaths have started to plummet in places like Israel, where vaccines have been widely administered, although a small number of side effects have was reported.

“So far, millions of people have been vaccinated with our vaccine following the endorsement of regulators in several countries,” said Pamela Eisele, a spokesman for Pfizer, who added that individuals who have questions should consult the Control and Control Centers website. Disease Prevention or your health care provider.

A spokeswoman for Moderna did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A November article in the New Eastern Outlook said that the use of the Pfizer mRNA gene editing vaccine was “radical experimental technology” that lacked “precision” and said he was rushed through the approval process with the help of billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci, president Biden’s chief medical advisor for the Covid-19 pandemic, both accused of the article “playing with human lives in their haste to get these experimental vaccines into our bodies”.

Some New Eastern Outlook articles have been republished by blogs and alleged international news sites. A January article claimed that the US has biological laboratories around the world that can lead to outbreaks of infectious diseases. The article was republished in whole or in part by websites in Bangladesh, Italy, Spain, France, Iran, Cuba and Sweden, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The United States has long accused Moscow of misinformation about medical issues. Judy Twigg, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and an expert on global health issues, said the Soviet KGB accused the CIA of spreading dengue in Cuba and malaria in Pakistan.

“A persistent KGB campaign claimed that the former US Army biological weapons laboratories in Fort Detrick had triggered the AIDS epidemic,” she said. The Soviet authorities have denied responsibility for this misinformation.

Thomas Rid, a Russian disinformation expert at Johns Hopkins University who reviewed the websites cited by the State Department, said the articles are generally in line with Russia’s “rich history” of using communication technology to deceive international and domestic audiences . He asked the United States government to do more to publicly explain how it concluded that the sites are controlled by specific Russian intelligence agencies.

With Russia and China trying to sell their vaccines abroad, open efforts to denigrate Pfizer have been well documented. The next report from the German Marshall Fund, which was reviewed by the Journal and due to be published on Monday, analyzed more than 35,000 tweets from the Russian, Chinese and Iranian government and the state media on vaccine topics from early November to early February. . “Russia has provided, by far, the most negative coverage of Western vaccines.” says, “with a notable 86% of Russian tweets surveyed mentioning Pfizer and 76% mentioning Modern coded as negative.”

—Ann Simmons contributed to this article.

Write to Michael R. Gordon at [email protected] and Dustin Volz at [email protected]