PerspectivePutin’s Long War Against American Science

A decade of health disinformation promoted by President Vladimir Putin of Russia has sown wide confusion, hurt major institutions and encouraged the spread of deadly illnesses. William J. Broad writes in the New York Times that the House, the Senate and the nation’s intelligence agencies have typically focused on election meddling in their examinations of Vladimir Putin’s long campaign to undermine Western societies and discredit democratic institutions and practices – but Putin’s broad and sustained campaign against the West has been waged on many fronts.
Attacking and discrediting Western science and medicine has been a central goal of the Russian campaign, as evidenced by the broad scope of Russia’s disinformation campaign on behalf of the anti-vaccine movement. The Putin regime mandates vaccination at home, but has launched a broad and sophisticated disinformation campaign in an effort to lower vaccine rates in Western countries, with two goals in mind: discredit Western science and medicine, and weaken Western societies by facilitating the re-emergence of diseases such as measles, long thought to have been eradicated.
“[Putin’s] agents have repeatedly planted and spread the idea that viral epidemics — including flu outbreaks, Ebola and now the coronavirus — were sown by American scientists,” Broad writes. “The Russian president has waged his long campaign by means of open media, secretive trolls and shadowy blogs that regularly cast American health officials as patronizing frauds. Of late, new stealth and sophistication have made his handiwork harder to see, track and fight.”

Broad writes:

·  “As the pandemic has swept the globe, it has been accompanied by a dangerous surge of false information—an ‘infodemic,’ according to the World Health Organization. Analysts say that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has played a principal role in the spread of false information as part of his wider effort to discredit the West and destroy his enemies from within.”

·  “An investigation by the New York Times—involving scores of interviews as well as a review of scholarly papers, news reports and Russian documents, tweets and TV shows—found that Mr. Putin has spread misinformation on issues of personal health for more than a decade.”

·  “His agents have repeatedly planted and spread the idea that viral epidemics—including flu outbreaks, Ebola and now the coronavirus—were sown by American scientists. The disinformers have also sought to undermine faith in the safety of vaccines, a triumph of public health that Mr. Putin himself promotes at home.”

·  “Moscow’s aim, experts say, is to portray American officials as downplaying the health alarms and thus posing serious threats to public safety.”