Russian officials for misinformation want to undermine confidence in Pfizer, other Covid-19 vaccines, US officials say

The sites increased the risk of side effects against the vaccines, questioned their effectiveness, and said the U.S. had rushed the Pfizer vaccine through the approval process, including false or misleading allegations.

Although the readership is small, US officials say they are injecting false narratives that could be reinforced by other Russian and international media.

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

In addition, the Russian state media and the Twitter accounts of the Russian government have made open attempts to raise concerns about the cost and safety of the Pfizer vaccine, which, according to experts outside the US government, is an attempt to sell the Russian competitor To promote Sputnik V.

“The emphasis on the dismantling of Pfizer is likely due to its status as the first vaccine next to Sputnik V to see mass use, posing a greater potential threat to Sputnik’s market dominance,” reads an upcoming Alliance report. for Securing Democracy, a non-governmental organization. which focuses on the danger posed by authoritarian governments to democracies and which is part of the German Marshall Fund, an American think tank.

The overseas efforts to cast doubt on the vaccine raise profound concerns about the efficacy and side effects of vaccines that have already occurred in some communities in the US and internationally. Concerns about side effects are a major reason for the hesitation of vaccines, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau released last month.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that Russian intelligence agencies were orchestrating articles against Western vaccines, saying U.S. officials were mistaken for the broad international debate on vaccines as a Russian conspiracy.

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

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

According to the official, New Eastern Outlook and Oriental Review are led and controlled by the SVR, or the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. They present themselves as academic publications and are aimed at the Middle East, Asia and Africa and comment on the US role in the world. The State Department said in an August report that New Eastern Outlook was linked to “state-funded institutions” in Russia.

Another publication, News Front, is led by the FSB, a security service that followed up on the KGB, the official said. The official is based in Crimea, provides information in ten languages ​​and visited nearly nine million pages between February and April 2020. In August, the State Department was less explicit, saying that News Front apparently had ties to Russia’s security services and Kremlin funding. has.

Rebel Inside, the fourth publication, is controlled by the GRU, which is an intelligence directorate of the Russian army’s staff. It has dealt with riots and protests and now looks dormant, the GEC official said.

The State Department has not previously gone so far as to say that these outlets are controlled or led by Russian intelligence agencies – an allegation that usually relies 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 a result of a joint “inter-agency” conclusion.

“Russian intelligence services bear direct responsibility for the use of 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 spread false narratives around the crisis.”

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

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

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

In the news media in the international media it is reported that an article in News Front in January took the risk that someone receiving the Pfizer or Moderna Inc.

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

In both cases, the Russian outlets are repeating actual news reports, but look at the opposite information about the general safety of the vaccine. Several studies and actual data have shown that the 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 shots have been widely administered, although a small number of side effects have been reported.

“To date, millions of people have been vaccinated with our vaccine after the approval of regulators in various countries,” said Pamela spokeswoman Pamela Eisele, who said individuals with questions should consult the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website or their healthcare provider.

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

An article in New Eastern Outlook in November states that the use of mRNA gene editing by the Pfizer vaccine was ‘radical experimental technology’ that was not ‘exact’, saying that it was rushed through the approval process with with the help of billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci, president Biden’s chief medical adviser for the Covid-19 pandemic, both of whom are accused in the article of ‘playing fast and loose with human lives in their haste around this experimental to get vaccines in our bodies. ‘

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

The US has long accused Moscow of leaking information on medical issues. Judy Twigg, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who is an expert on global health issues, said the Soviet KGB accused the CIA of spreading dengue fever in Cuba and malaria in Pakistan.

” An ongoing KGB campaign alleges that former U.S. military laboratories in Fort Detrick unleashed the AIDS epidemic, ” she said. Soviet officials denied responsibility for the information.

Thomas Rid, an expert on Russian disinformation at Johns Hopkins University who reviewed the State Department’s websites, said the articles were “in line with Russia’s ‘rich history’ of using them. communication technology to deceive the international and local public. He urged the US government to do more to publicly state the conclusion that the sites were controlled by specific Russian intelligence agencies.

While Russia and China are trying to sell their vaccines abroad, open attempts to oust Pfizer have been well documented. In the forthcoming German Marshall Fund report, which was reviewed by the Journal and due to be released on Monday, more than 35,000 Russian, Chinese and Iranian government and state media tweets on the vaccine themes were analyzed from early November to early February. “Russia offers by far the most negative coverage of Western vaccines.” it reads, “with a remarkable 86% of the Russian tweets polled citing Pfizer and 76% citing Moderna as negative.”

—Ann Simmons contributed to this article.

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