Russia’s disinformation campaign aims to undermine confidence in Pfizer, another Covid-19 vaccine, US officials say

The websites assessed the risk of side effects of the vaccines, questioned their effectiveness and said the US had hastened the Pfizer vaccine through the approval process, among other false or misleading claims.

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

“We can say that these contact points are directly related to the Russian intelligence services,” the Global Engagement Center official said of the sites behind the disinformation campaign. “All of them are foreign-owned, based outside the United States. They vary a lot in terms of coverage, tone, audience, but they are all part of the Russian propaganda and misinformation ecosystem. ”

In addition, Russian state media and the Russian government’s Twitter accounts have made clear efforts to raise concerns about the cost and safety of the Pfizer vaccine in what experts outside the U.S. government say is an effort to promote the sale of the Russian rival of the Sputnik V vaccine.

“The focus on denigrating Pfizer is likely due to its first vaccine status other than Sputnik V which sees mass use, resulting in a greater potential threat to Sputnik’s market dominance,” says a future report from the Alliance for the Security of Democracy. a non-governmental organization that focuses on the danger that authoritarian governments pose to democrats and is part of the German Marshall Fund, a US think tank.

Foreign efforts to sow doubts about the vaccine exploit deep anxieties about the effectiveness and side effects of vaccines that were already widespread in some communities in the United States and internationally. Concern about side effects is a major reason for the vaccine’s hesitation, according to US Census Bureau data released last month.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that Russian intelligence agencies were orchestrating articles against Western vaccines and said US officials were wrong to characterize the wide-ranging international debate on vaccines as a Russian conspiracy.

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

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

New Eastern Outlook and Oriental Review, the official said, are directed and controlled by SVR or Russia’s foreign intelligence service. It presents itself as academic publications and targets the Middle East, Asia and Africa, providing commentary on the US role in the world. The State Department said in an August report that the New Eastern Outlook is linked to Russia’s “state-funded institutions.”

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

Rebel Inside, the fourth publication, was controlled by GRU, which is an intelligence directorate of the Russian Armed Forces Staff. It has covered riots and protests and now seems latent, the GEC official said.

Previously, the State Department did not go so far as to say that these outlets were controlled or guided by Russian intelligence agencies – a statement that is generally based on US classified information.

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

“Russian intelligence services bear direct responsibility for using these four platforms to spread propaganda and lies,” the spokesman said. “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.

The social media accounts affiliated with the four websites have been largely removed from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest,

although some non-English accounts remained active earlier this year.

Highlighting reports in the international media, a January article in the News Front presented the risk as a person receiving Pfizer or Moderna Inc.

the vaccines could contract Bell’s palsy, in which the facial muscles are paralyzed, while a February article focused on a man in California who was said to be positive for Covid-19 after receiving the Pfizer vaccine.

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

“So far, millions of people have been vaccinated with our vaccine after regulatory approval in several countries,” said Pamela Eisele, a Pfizer spokeswoman, who added that people with questions should consult the site. the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or their healthcare provider.

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

A November article in the New Eastern Outlook said the use of the Pfizer mRNA gene modification vaccine was “radical experimental technology” that lacked “accuracy” and said it was rushed through the approval process by billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci. chairman Biden’s chief medical adviser for the Covid-19 pandemic, both accused of “playing with human lives quickly and freely in their haste to introduce these experimental vaccines into our bodies.”

Some New Eastern Outlook articles have been republished by blogs and supposedly international news sites. A January article claimed that the United States has biological laboratories around the world that can lead to outbreaks of infectious diseases. The article has been republished in whole or in part by sites in Bangladesh, Italy, Spain, France, Iran, Cuba and Sweden, which have been 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 who is a global health expert, said the Soviet KGB accused the CIA of spreading dengue fever in Cuba and malaria in Pakistan.

“A persistent KGB campaign has claimed that the former biological weapons laboratories of the US military at Fort Detrick have triggered the AIDS epidemic,” she said. Soviet officials denied responsibility for the misinformation.

Thomas Rid, a Russian misinformation expert at Johns Hopkins University, who analyzed websites cited by the State Department, said the articles were generally consistent with Russia’s “rich history” of using communications technology to mislead both audiences. international as well as domestic. He called on the US government to do more to explain publicly how it came to the conclusion that the websites were controlled by specific Russian intelligence agencies.

As Russia and China try to sell their vaccines abroad, the obvious efforts to denigrate Pfizer have been well documented. The forthcoming report of 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 governments and the state media on vaccine issues since the beginning. from November to the beginning of February. “Russia has offered by far the most negative coverage of Western vaccines.” it states, “with a remarkable 86% of the Russian tweets surveyed mentioning Pfizer and 76% mentioning that Moderna is coded as negative.”

“Ann Simmons contributed to this article.”

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