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

The websites analyzed the risk of vaccine side effects, questioned their effectiveness, and said the United States had precipitated the Pfizer vaccine through the approval process, among other false or misleading claims.

Although point-of-sale readers are small, U.S. officials say they inject false narratives that can be amplified by other Russian and international media.

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

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

“The emphasis on denigrating Pfizer is probably due to its status as the first vaccine, in addition to Sputnik V, which is mass-used, posing a greater potential threat to the dominance of the Pfizer market. Sputnik, ”says a forthcoming report from the Alliance for the Security of Democracy, a non-governmental organization. which focuses on the danger posed by authoritarian governments to democracies and is part of the German Marshall Fund, a U.S. think tank.

Foreign efforts to sow doubts about the vaccine exploit deep concerns about the efficacy and side effects of vaccines that were already prevalent in some U.S. and international communities. Concern about side effects is one of the main reasons for the vaccine to falter, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released last month.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that Russian intelligence agencies were orchestrating articles against Western vaccines and said U.S. officials erroneously characterize the broad international debate over 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 from Moscow.” If we treat all negative publications against the Sputnik V vaccine as a result of the efforts of the northern special services. Americans, we will go crazy because we see it every day, every hour and in all the Anglo-Saxon media. ”

The GEC State Department official said four publications had direct links to Russian intelligence and that the Russian government used them to mislead international opinion on various topics.

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

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

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

Previously, the State Department had failed to say that these outlets were controlled or guided by Russian intelligence agencies, a claim that is generally based on U.S. classified 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 conclusion between agencies.”

“Russian intelligence services have a direct responsibility to use 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 English-language accounts did not remain active earlier this year.

Highlighting international media reports, a January article published in News Front posed the risk that a person would receive the Pfizer or the Moderna Inc.

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

In each case, Russian outlets repeated real news, but ignored the opposite information about the overall 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 fall in places like Israel where shots have been widely administered, all and that there are a small number of side effects. has been reported.

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

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

A November article in the New Eastern Outlook said that the use of the Pfizer vaccine for mRNA gene editing was a “radical experimental technology” that had no “accuracy” and said it was rushed through the process. of approval with the help of billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci, president Biden’s chief medical adviser for the Covid-19 pandemic, both accused of the article of “playing fast with human life in his hurry to get these experimental vaccines to our bodies “.

Some New Eastern Outlook articles have been reissued by blogs and alleged international news sites. A January article alleged that the United States has biological laboratories around the world that can cause 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 misinforming about medical issues. Judy Twigg, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, an expert on global health issues, said the Soviet KGB had accused the CIA of infecting dengue fever in Cuba and malaria in Pakistan.

“A persistent KGB campaign claimed that the former U.S. Army biological weapons laboratories in Fort Detrick had triggered the AIDS epidemic,” he said. Soviet officials denied responsibility for this misinformation.

Thomas Rid, a Russian misinformation expert at Johns Hopkins University who reviewed websites cited by the State Department, said the articles generally coincide with Russia’s “rich history” of using communications technology to deceive. to both national and international audiences. He urged the U.S. government to do more to publicly explain how it has concluded that the websites are controlled by specific Russian intelligence agencies.

With Russia and China wanting to sell their vaccines abroad, open efforts to denigrate Pfizer have been documented. The next report from the German Marshall Fund, which was reviewed by the Journal and will be published on Monday, analyzed more than 35,000 tweets from the Russian, Chinese and Iranian governments on vaccine issues from early November to early February. “Russia provided by far the most negative coverage of Western vaccines.” states, “with a remarkable 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]