Autism in Russia

  In The Politics of Autism, I discuss international perspectives.

Ayman Eckford at The Moscow Times:

One of the biggest issues in talking about autism in Russia is that it is extremely difficult for adults to be recognized as autistic.

Although Russia officially recognizes the World Health Organization’s norms and uses the ICD-10 medical standardization system (though not the updated ICD-11 codes). Instead, doctors often rely on outdated Soviet-era standards, where autism is equated with childhood schizophrenia, which means that autistic people automatically have their diagnosis changed when they turn 18.

This results in autistic adults not only being denied support and recognition but also facing an increased risk of forced institutionalization. In Russia, there are many jobs you cannot get if you are diagnosed with schizophrenia, and the social stigma is extremely severe.

And this automatic diagnosis change is not just a relic of the Soviet past — it remains alive in medical education. In 2015, I spoke to a medical student at one of Saint Petersburg’s top universities. He told me that, according to his curriculum, distinguishing autism from schizophrenia is extremely difficult.

There is a deeper ideological reason for this.

The stereotype of autism as a form of schizophrenia is not just medical incompetence. It is not a political myth, rooted deeply in Russian history.

During the Soviet era, many political dissidents were forcibly hospitalized and given diagnoses like schizophrenia or sluggish schizophrenia. The latter was a fictional disorder created by Soviet psychiatrists after World War II.

Ukrainians with Disabilities

 In The Politics of Autism, I discuss international perspectives.  In Ukraine, children with autism and other disabilities are suffering.

The continued military attacks against Ukraine are putting the lives of an estimated 2.7 million people with disabilities at risk. The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities today deplored the Russian Federation’s aggression despite repeated calls for a ceasefire and cessation of hostilities. The Committee issued the following statement:

“The Committee is deeply disturbed that the fate of people with disabilities in Ukraine is largely unknown. There are ongoing reports that many people with disabilities, including children, are trapped or abandoned in their homes, residential care institutions and orphanages, with no access to life-sustaining medications, oxygen supplies, food, water, sanitation, support for daily living and other basic facilities.

People with disabilities have limited or no access to emergency information, shelters and safe havens, and many have been separated from their support networks, leaving them unable to respond to the situation and navigate their surroundings.

The continued military attacks leave people with disabilities extremely vulnerable and at grave risk of harm. Women with disabilities are at heightened risk of rape and sexual violence that has been widely reported. Few people with disabilities are reported to be internally displaced or to have reached Ukraine’s borders, indicating that many of them have not been able to flee to safety.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities requires States to ensure the inclusion of people with disabilities when meeting their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian and human rights law. Ratified by both the Russian Federation and Ukraine, the Convention requires States to take all necessary measures to ensure the protection and safety of people with disabilities in situations of risk, including armed conflict and humanitarian emergencies.

States parties to the Convention also have obligations for cooperation between and among States, and in partnership with representative organisations of people with disabilities and other civil society organizations, to provide humanitarian assistance that is inclusive and accessible.

The Committee urges all States, UN agencies, civil society and other stakeholders involved in humanitarian action to recognise and respond to the pleas and requirements of people with disabilities caught up in the hostilities. Their specific requirements, including according to gender and age, should be identified and included in all responses to the crisis. Ensuring access to humanitarian corridors, inclusion in evacuation and crisis response plans and the provision of accessible emergency information and communications are measures which should be implemented.

Measures need to be taken to ensure that all people with disabilities are accounted for, protected and provided with immediate access to humanitarian aid, taking into account their individual support requirements. Refugees and internally displaced people with disabilities, and people with disabilities in refugee-like situations need to be provided with support tailored to their individual requirements at border crossings, reception and accommodation facilities and to be provided with relocation assistance. Children with disabilities should be provided with individualised support to ensure they are not separated from their families and are protected from institutionalisation and other harmful practices, such as trafficking.

Above all, the Committee calls upon the Russian Federation to immediately end the hostilities and observe and respect the principles of international human rights and humanitarian law.

The Committee will continue to monitor the situation of people with disabilities in the conflict, in close cooperation with organisations of people with disabilities and human rights organisations.”

Russia's War Hurts Autistic People

 In The Politics of Autism, I discuss international perspectives.  In Ukraine, children with autism and other disabilities are suffering.

Remarks by Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield at a UN Security Council Briefing on the Humanitarian Impact of Russia’s War Against Ukraine

Madam President, last night, I returned from a trip to Moldova and Romania. I saw with my own eyes the refugee crisis caused by Russia’s unconscionable war. I spoke to refugees who indicated to me their desires to return to their home. And we’ve all seen the images on TV of the bombed-out buildings. But what we have not seen is that behind those destroyed buildings are destroyed lives and destroyed families. I met with women and children who had fled Ukraine, who stuffed their lives into backpacks and left the only home they had ever known. And these were sobering conversations.

One young woman I spoke to came with her six-year-old brother, who has autism and is struggling with cancer. Their single mother helped them escape to save their lives, but Russia’s war has interrupted the care her brother desperately needs.

Russia Spread Vaccine Disinformation in Ukraine

 In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  Russian trolls have spread the myth via social media.  They are also spreading other vaccine disinformation.  Antivaxxers are doing Putin's work for him. 

 Melissa Healy and Emily Baumgaertner at LAT:

Long before Russia launched its military assault on Ukraine, its citizens had been targeted for years by another Russian campaign — one designed to undermine confidence in Western vaccines and the governments offering them to their citizens.

The anti-vaccine messages were actively encouraged by President Vladimir Putin’s government, broadcast by Russian state television, and amplified on social media by Russian computer bots. The offensive was part of a larger effort to sow division within fledgling democracies and heighten suspicion of the West across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics.

In Ukraine, the seeds of vaccine skepticism fell on particularly fertile ground. Just 35% of residents are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, and only 1% more are partially vaccinated — among the lowest such rates in Europe, according to data from Oxford University. Childhood immunizations for diseases like measles and polio are among the continent’s lowest as well.

That gives public health officials reason for worry as more than 3.6 million Ukrainian refugees have poured into other countries and millions more are displaced within Ukraine, often hunkered down in crowded, frigid places without clean water or electricity.

Ukraine, Russia, and Antivaxxers

 In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  Russian trolls have spread the myth via social media.  They are also spreading other vaccine disinformation.  Antivaxxers are doing Putin's work for him. 

At Politico, Laura Kayali and Mark Scott report that "Western anti-vaccine groups and conspiracy theorists have shifted quickly from parroting falsehoods about the global pandemic to peddling misinformation about the war, often from Moscow's viewpoint."  They continue:

The information war is playing out in real time across the European Union and the United States as well-organized and large online communities that had previously pushed back against COVID-19 restrictions are now framing Russia’s invasion as being between good-guy Moscow and Kyiv and its Western allies — now cast as New World Order oppressors — according to misinformation experts and fact-checking groups.

"The conspiracy sphere is an empty shell of sorts that aggregates as news unfolds," said Pauline Talagrand, who’s overseeing Agence France-Presse’s fact-checking work worldwide. "Whether it's vaccines or masks, there is always something that will trigger people who can be easily manipulated and are distrustful of traditional information."

“The problem with these recurring crises is that they contribute to the enlargement of these spheres and lead to the entrenchment of their narratives,” she added. 

In the US, Republican pols are in the forefront.

From Morning Consult:

Russia and Antivaxxers

In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  Russian trolls have spread the myth via social media.  They are also spreading other vaccine disinformation.  Antivaxxers are doing Putin's work for him. 

Seventeen House members voted against Russia sanctions this week.  Most have encouraged vaccine skepticism or have ties to the antivax movement:

• Lauren Boebert (R-CO)
• Madison Cawthorn (R-NC)
• Matt Gaetz (R-FL)
• Louis Gohmert (R-TX)
• Paul Gosar (R-AZ)
• Greene (R-GA)
• Grothman (R-WI)
• Massie (R-KY)
• Posey (R-FL)
• Roy (R-TX)
• Tiffany (R-TX)

They are all bad, but on vaccines, Posey is the worst. Seven years ago, at Respectful Insolence, Orac took him:

I’ll also dispense with Posey’s denial that he is antivaccine, stated thusly, “To begin with, I am absolutely, resolutely pro-vaccine. Advancements in immunization have saved countless lives and have greatly benefited public health.” This is almost as risible as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. characterizing himself as “fiercely pro-vaccine.” It’s nonsense. Posey is a man who has been on the side of the antivaccine fringe for quite some time. Heck, he even appeared at the antivaccine quackfest Autism One in 2013 as part of a “Congressional panel”! He even introduced legislation that’s gone nowhere requiring the CDC to do a retrospective “vaccinated vs. unvaccinated” study. As I put it, Posey appears to be vying to take over the title of most antivaccine legislator in the U.S. Congress since Dan Burton retired. Not surprisingly, he has received not-insubstantial donations from prominent members of the antivaccine movement, several with names that, if you typed them into the search box of this blog, would bring up multiple posts packed with pristine Insolence. Whenever someone who is a associated with the antivaccine movement and has demonstrated antivaccine proclivities through his actions so piously denies being antivaccine, a good rule of thumb is that he is almost certainly antivaccine, and in this case Posey is just that.

Antivaxxers Amenable to Russian Propaganda

In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  Russian trolls have spread the myth via social media.  They are also spreading other vaccine disinformation.  Antivaxxers are doing Putin's work for him. 

Kiera Butler at Mother Jones:

Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve seen how conspiracy theories can overlap and collide. I’ve documented how anti-vaccine groups embraced QAnon disinformation about liberal elites conspiring to unseat Trump, and how white nationalists find willing audiences for their racist ideology in anti-mask groups. Over the last week, a new disinformation hybrid has appeared, as online anti-vaccine groups have become a hotbed of pro-Russia conspiracy theories about the conflict in Ukraine—and some of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists are actively promoting geopolitical falsehoods.

Imran Ahmed, executive director of the online extremism tracking group Center for Countering Digital Hate, has been following the convergence of the conspiracy theories, and he’s noticed they share familiar themes: alleged secret government alliances, anti-Semitic accusations, and allusions to nefarious scientists. “There are particular individuals within the anti-vaccine world who are amenable to pro-Russian propaganda,” he says, “and that would include some of the people who’ve cohered around QAnon and Trump.”

One example of this is how an old Trump-era storyline—the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately engineered in a lab and released—seems to have been reconstituted in a new form: Anti-vaccine influencers claim that the United States owns a network of secret biolabs in Ukraine where dangerous infectious disease research takes place. For them, it’s just obvious that Biden is sending aid to Ukraine in order to protect those assets. This rumor has been proven to be manifestly false—but that hasn’t stopped it from circulating and gaining momentum.

Russian Disinformation Targets Antivaxxers

In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  Russian trolls have spread the myth via social media.  They are also spreading other vaccine disinformation.  Antivaxxers are doing Putin's work for him.

Brian Contreras and Wendy Lee at LAT:

Over the last few days, researchers have warned that President Vladimir Putin’s regime is pushing, and will continue to push, false narratives aimed at justifying its aggression.

At least some of those narratives are finding purchase among an American public divided by previous waves of disinformation, said Graham Brookie, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “What we see … is not an insignificant amount of organic audience engagement from U.S. citizens that are predisposed to have their previously held beliefs reinforced by Russian disinformation.”

For instance, he said, anti-vaccine groups that are already skeptical of the U.S. government are now primed to disbelieve the official U.S. government narrative around Ukraine.

Russian “influence operations” relying on disinformation “exist at a steady state,” and have for years, added Brookie, but the ramp-up to war in Ukraine has brought “a massive surge.”

Jennifer Granston, head of insights at the social media analytics firm Zignal Labs, said the conspiracy theory that the Ukraine conflict is a government-manufactured distraction from supposed harms of COVID-19 vaccines is one of the disinformation narratives her company has monitored in recent days, along with the claim, embraced by a Russian state media outlet, that the invasion is a mere “peacekeeping mission.”

Russia Pushes Antivax Messages

In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  Russian trolls have spread the myth via social media.  They are also spreading other vaccine disinformation.  Antivaxxers are doing Putin's work for him.

The Virality Project (2022). Memes, Magnets and Microchips: Narrative dynamics around COVID-19 vaccines. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/mx395xj8490

 The first operation linked to Russian actors involved a small network of fake personas that targeted right-leaning audiences on alternative social media platforms Gab and Parler, as well as the far-right discussion forum patriots[.]win, as early as November 2020. The accounts in the network posted a series of memes, articles, and messages that appeared aimed to exacerbate existing social and political tensions in the United States, including around the Biden administration’s response to COVID-19 and the vaccine rollout. Many of these posts featured highly inflammatory political cartoons, which may have been created by the actors themselves, and leveraged a variety of divisive partisan themes, such as suggestions that Biden was benefiting from Trump’s hard work to combat the pandemic while ignoring other issues such as rising US inflation. The accounts also attempted to amplify anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, spread doubts about vaccine efficacy, and depict the vaccine rollout as state-imposed oppression designed to enrich pharmaceutical companies and erode American freedoms.146 The actors behind this operation have been linked to the same group responsible for the “Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens” (NAEBC), a fake right-wing news outlet that targeted US audiences ahead of the 2020 election and was connected to Russia’s Internet Research Agency.147 

A second operation was attributed to a marketing firm operating from Russia called Fazze.148 While it is not clear who Fazze was working for, the company appears to have engaged in a concerted effort to covertly disseminate narratives online denigrating Western-made COVID-19 vaccines, including by attempting to hire YouTube influencers to deliver unattributed messages. In late 2020, for example, the group spread memes on Facebook and Instagram suggesting the AstraZeneca vaccine was dangerous because it was developed from a chimpanzee adenovirus—claims echoed by some Russian state media outlets that have attacked AstraZeneca for producing a “monkey vaccine.”149 Months later, the same actors were caught attempting to seed misleading information online about the safety of the Pfizer vaccine, this time by disseminating an alleged internal AstraZeneca report on vaccine mortality rates.150 Fake personas posted copies of the report online alongside a propaganda article, which claimed that the report was hacked orleaked. Fake social media accounts then posted these articles to groups concerned with COVID-19 information and vaccine safety. Fazze also contacted prominent social media influencers, offering to pay them to post videos amplifying the claims to YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.151 The effort was quickly exposed, in part because the targeted influencers posted instead about the manipulative outreach, but some reports have noted that at least two influencers posted videos that appear to match the instructions that Fazze distributed.152

The narrative themes present in the efforts undertaken by the covert actors, particularly attempts to exacerbate existing social and political cleavages, were mirrored by Russian state media and representatives. For example, RT amplified claims suggesting vaccine passports are akin to government overreach and population segregation, proclaimed the emergence of a global “#Covid apartheid,” and suggested that harms associated with mRNA vaccines were downplayed by the media in collusion with US business elites.154 Russian state media also amplified research of questionable veracity that suggested Western vaccines are ineffective or harmful. However, in contrast to the covert campaigns , which were not intended to be obviously pro-Russian, the overt state media approach additionally contrasted the supposed failures of Western vaccines with the success of the Sputnik V vaccine. When the rollout of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was paused to review a possible risk of blood clots, Russian state media paired neutral coverage of the specific story with articles highlighting the lack of blood clots associated with the Sputnik V vaccine.155 Russianstate media additionally featured interviews with anti-vaccine influencers who had been deplatformed by mainstream social media platforms—implying or suggesting that the US was censoring those critical of potentially dangerous vaccines.156

Antivax Movement Starts to Infect Canada

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Antivaxxers are sometimes violent, often abusive, and always wrong.  

 Dr. Peter Hotez at Global News:

Well, it has finally happened. News this week of widespread and disruptive anti-vaccine protests at Canadian medical centres means that America’s destructive, self-defeating and totally nonsensical anti-vaccine movement has begun crossing the border.


As a pediatrician, vaccine-scientist and parent of an adult daughter with autism and intellectual disabilities, I have had a front-row seat to America’s anti-vaccine movement for the last two decades. I’m also a lead target, and sometimes known as the ‘OG Villain’ for writing the book, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism a few years back.

...
Today, the anti-vaccine movement has three major drivers. One of them is anti-science aggression from the far-right, as highlighted above. However, there are also at least a dozen non-governmental groups identified by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate as responsible for approximately two-thirds of the anti-vaccine disinformation in America.

The third is Russian propaganda, which promotes anti-vaccine disinformation as a means to destabilize the U.S. and other democratic countries, possibly including Canada.

The Russian Connection, Redux

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Antivaxxers are sometimes violent, often abusive, and always wrong.  They are also aiding our Russian adversaries.

Elizabeth Culliford at Reuters:

Facebook (FB.O) said on Tuesday it had removed a network of accounts from Russia that it linked to a marketing firm which aimed to enlist influencers to push anti-vaccine content about the COVID-19 jabs.

The social media company said it had banned accounts connected to Fazze, a subsidiary of UK-registered marketing firm AdNow, which primarily conducted its operations from Russia, for violating its policy against foreign interference. Facebook said the campaign used its platforms primarily to target audiences in India, Latin America and, to a smaller extent, the United States.

The company's investigators called the campaign a "disinformation laundromat," creating misleading articles and petitions on forums like Reddit, Medium and Change.org, and using fake accounts on platforms like Facebook and Instagram to amplify the content. Facebook said while the majority of the campaign fell flat, the crux of it appeared to be engaging with paid influencers and these posts attracted "some limited attention."

The report is here. 

Russian Vaccine Disinformation, Continued

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Antivaxxers are sometimes violent, often abusive, and always wrong.  They are also aiding our Russian adversaries.

Michael R. Gordon and Dustin Volz at WSJ:

Russian intelligence agencies have mounted a campaign to undermine confidence in Pfizer Inc.’s and other Western vaccines, using online publications that in recent months have questioned the vaccines’ development and safety, U.S. officials said.

An official with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which monitors foreign disinformation efforts, identified four publications that he said have served as fronts for Russian intelligence.

The websites played up the vaccines’ risk of side effects, questioned their efficacy, and said the U.S. had rushed the Pfizer vaccine through the approval process, among other false or misleading claims.

Though the outlets’ readership is small, U.S. officials say they inject false narratives that can be amplified by other Russian and international media.

...

“The emphasis on denigrating Pfizer is likely due to its status as the first vaccine besides Sputnik V to see mass use, resulting in a greater potential threat to Sputnik’s market dominance,” says a forthcoming report by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nongovernmental organization that focuses on the danger that authoritarian governments pose to democracies and that is part of the German Marshall Fund, a U.S. think tank.

Confidence in Vaccines

 In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing disease to spread.  Trump has helped spread misinformation.

Ali H. Mokdad, Peter J. Hotez, and Walter A. Orenstein at EClinicalMedicine:

[We] need to effectively message and build the public's confidence in vaccine. Overcoming vaccine hesitancy is no small task in the current political and cultural climate. Honing a message across media that imparts to the public a trust in the process will help determine vaccination rates. We in the scientific community need to roll up our sleeves and show that fresh-to-market vaccines are safe, effective, and necessary. Popular public figures and trusted institutions need to promote vaccinations to accelerate us across the herd immunity threshold. In parallel, we must recognize the pervasive aspects of anti-vaccine messaging across the internet, including social media and e-commerce platforms. Anti-vaccination rumors, misinformation, and conspiracy theories swirl in a fractured media universe; their origins are diverse and include dedicated anti-vaccine organizations, political extremist groups, and even the Russian Government [5,6]

[5]. https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-11-08/britains-gchq-to-wage-cyber-war-on-anti-vaccine-propaganda-the-times. Accessed 12/1/2020 View in Article  Google Scholar
[6].Broniatowski D.A. Jamison A.M. Qi S. AlKulaib L. Chen T. Benton A. Quinn S.C. Dredze M
Weaponized health communication: Twitter bots and russian trolls amplify the vaccine debate.Am J Publ Health. 2018; 108: 1378-1384

Russian Antivax Efforts, 2020

In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  Russian trolls have spread the myth via social media.  They are also spreading other vaccine disinformation.  Antivaxxers are doing Putin's work for him.

Amanda Seitz at AP:

A false report claiming five Ukrainians had died after taking an American-made coronavirus vaccine spread in just a matter of days from a small Kremlin-friendly website to an audience of thousands in U.S.-based Facebook groups.

Russian media outlets picked up the claim, and soon social media users in the U.S. were sharing screenshots and links to those articles — all as 30,000 Americans were preparing to roll up their sleeves for shots of an experimental COVID-19 vaccine late last month.

The fast dissemination of a single report from an obscure Ukrainian website to crowds of Facebook users highlights the ease with which pro-Russian websites can feed misinformation into American internet circles. In fact, one of the websites that picked up the report was identified by the U.S. State Department this week as being part of a network of proxy misinformation websites being used by the Russian government.

As various countries race to produce a successful coronavirus vaccine, disinformation experts are bracing for a steady drum of misleading claims and propaganda aimed at undermining competing countries’ efforts to develop an antidote. Misinformation could raise distrust and fear around a vaccine, threatening government leaders’ hopes of ending the pandemic. And the U.S., which is readying plans to deliver 300 million doses to Americans starting next year, if a successful vaccine is identified, could be a prime target.

Anti-Vaxxers, Russia, and National Security

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing disease to spread.  Trump has helped spread misinformation.

David Klepper and Beatrice Dupuy at Associated Press:

A coronavirus vaccine is still months or years away, but groups that peddle misinformation about immunizations are already taking aim, potentially eroding confidence in what could be humanity’s best chance to defeat the virus.

In recent weeks, vaccine opponents have made several unsubstantiated claims, including allegations that vaccine trials will be dangerously rushed or that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, is blocking cures to enrich vaccine makers. They’ve also falsely claimed that Microsoft founder Bill Gates wants to use a vaccine to inject microchips into people — or to cull 15% of the world’s population.
...
“The coronavirus has created this perfect storm of misinformation,” remarked David A. Broniatowski, an associate professor at George Washington University’s school of engineering and applied science who has published several studies on vaccine misinformation.
...
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine critic who helped popularize unsubstantiated claims that vaccines can cause autism, said Gates’ work gives him “dictatorial control of global health policy.” Roger Stone, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, went further on a New York City radio show, saying Gates “and other globalists” are using the coronavirus “for mandatory vaccinations and microchipping people.”
...
The vaccine debate is fertile ground for groups looking to sow discord in the United States. Russia seized on it to create divisions before the 2016 U.S. election, and appears to be at it again.

A report from a European Union disinformation task force found numerous conspiracy theories in English-language Russian media, including state-run RT, claiming an eventual vaccine will be used to inject nanoparticles into people.

“When pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets spread anti-vaccine tropes, they become responsible for those who will hesitate to seek professional medical care,” the EU report said.

Jason Wilson at The Guardian:

America’s “anti-vaxxer movement” would pose a threat to national security in the event of a “pandemic with a novel organism”, an FBI-connected non-profit research group warned last year, just months before the global coronavirus pandemic began.

In a research paper put out by the little-known in-house journal of InfraGard – a national security group affiliated with the FBI – experts warned the US anti-vaccine movement would also be connected with “social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns” orchestrated by the Russian government.

Since the virus hit America, anti-vaccination activists and some sympathetic legislators around the country have led or participated in protests against stay-at-home orders designed to slow the spread of the deadly virus. More than 50,000 people have died in the US.

From "The Anti-Vaxxers Movement and National Security," by Mark Jarrett and Christine Sublett.

The modern anti-vaxxer movement, composed of people who falsely believe that vaccines are dangerous, started with the publication 20 years ago of a now-retracted study by David [sic, Andrew] Wakefield that erroneously linked the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) to autism (McCoy 2015). And while the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has released studies that show no link between autism and vaccines or that an aggressive vaccination schedule for children causes autism, many people still believe that there is a connection and refuse to vaccinate their children. There has also been a rejection of scientific evidence in many communities that vaccines protect against disease, predating widespread use of the Internet and social media. Worldwide, there are many cases of leaders lying to their citizens about vaccine efficacy in populist movements, including by Italy’s Five Star Movement, which is now a part of that country’s government, and among the Taliban in Afghanistan. Healthcare workers involved in intelligence operations in locales including Pakistan has led to distrust of the services offered, including vaccines against deadly diseases like polio and measles (McNeil, Jr. 2012).

•  McCoy, Terrence. 2015. “The Disneyland Measles Outbreak and the Disgraced Doctor Who Whipped Up Vaccination Fear.” The Washington Post, January 23, 2015.http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/01/23/the-disneyland-measlesoutbreak-and-the-disgraced-doctor-who-whipped-up-fear-about-vaccinations/  
• McNeil, Jr., Donald G. 2012. “C.I.A. Vaccine Ruse May Have Harmed the War on Polio.” New York Times, July 9, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/health/cia-vaccine-ruse-inpakistan-may-have-harmed-polio-fight.html

Antivaxxers Are Doing Putin's Work for Him

In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  Russian trolls have spread the myth via social media.  Antivaxxers are doing Putin's work for him.

William J. Broad at NYT:

At the same time, Mr. Putin has worked hard to encourage Americans to see vaccinations as dangerous and federal health officials as malevolent. The threat of autism is a regular theme of this anti-vaccine campaign. The C.D.C. has repeatedly ruled out the possibility that vaccinations lead to autism, as have many scientists and top journals. Nonetheless the false narrative has proliferated, spread by Russian trolls and media.

Moreover, the disinformation has sought to implicate the C.D.C. in a cover-up. For years, tweets originating in St. Petersburg have claimed that the health agency muzzled a whistle-blower to hide evidence that vaccines cause autism, especially in male African-American infants. Medical experts have dismissed the allegation, but it reverberated.

In a series of 2015 tweets, Russian trolls promoted a video of a black minister in Los Angeles addressing a rally. “They’re not just shooting us with guns,” he told the audience. “They’re killing us with needles.” The minister and accompanying text in the video claimed that childhood immunizations had caused autism in 200,000 black children.

RT America echoed the charge. It focused on “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe,” a 2016 film by Andrew Wakefield, a discredited anti-vaccine activist. When the film was pulled from the Tribeca Film Festival after a public outcry, the network aired an interview with its creators. “Can we trust the C.D.C. on vaccines?” a plug for the show asked.

Russian trolls fired off tweets containing links to the film and a fund-raising site for its promotion. One claimed that autism rates were about to skyrocket to “1 in 2” vaccinated children.

Mr. Putin’s disinformation blitz has coincided with a drop in vaccination rates among children in the United States and a rise in measles, a disease once considered vanquished. The virus, especially in infants and young children, can cause fevers and brain damage. Last year, according to the C.D.C., the United States had 1,282 new cases, a record in recent decades; of these, 128 involved hospitalizations and 61 resulted in major complications such as pneumonia and encephalitis.