• Some Doctors Spreading Coronavirus Misinformation Are Being Punished

    State medical boards are receiving more and more complaints about false or misleading information about COVID-19, but only a handful have taken action against doctors. Researchers say that misinformation delivered by doctors can be particularly insidious as a result of the credibility associated with their profession and the difficulty that patients may experience try to debunk their highly technical language.

  • Human and Economic Impacts of Covid-19

    The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the behavior of businesses and households.  Those behavioral changes, intensified by government actions like mandatory closures, have had a reverberating impact on the U.S. economy.

  • “Big Data Paradox”: 2 Early Vaccination Surveys Worse Than Worthless

    “Big data paradox” is a mathematical tendency of big data sets to minimize one type of error, due to small sample size, but magnify another that tends to get less attention: flaws linked to systematic biases that make the sample a poor representation of the larger population. Analyst found that that tendency caused two early vaccination surveys to be misleading – a findings which holds warning for tracking efforts as governments and health officials as they formulate policies to battle the pandemic.

  • How the U.K. Government Managed the Balance between Taking Credit and Apportioning Blame for Its Covid Response

    How does a government manage a problem like COVID-19? Political scientists have long noted that governance is not just about managing the problem itself: Governance is also the managing of wider perceptions and expectations of how the problem is being managed. To manage the perceptions of how it was managing the crisis, the U.K. government used four key narratives: unprecedented government activism; working to plan; national security, wartime unity and sacrifice; and scientific guidance.

  • How Has COVID-19 Changed the Violent Extremist Landscape?

    Coronavirus has highlighted how anxiety, uncertainty, and the reordering of democratic state-citizen relations can breed susceptibility to violent extremist thinking and action.

  • German Police Investigating Anti-Vax Assassination Plot against German Politician

    A group of conspiracy theorists used Telegram to call for an armed response to Saxony’s state premier Michael Kretschmer’s restrictions on the unvaccinated. The right-wing extremism branch of Saxony’s anti-terror unit is investigating.

  • Viral Vendettas: Pandemic-Driven Growth of Online Conspiratorial Movements

    Graphika has just released a new report which  tracks the growth of conspiratorial movements online throughout the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, seeking to understand how these communities have evolved, and to what extent they have enabled real-world and online harms.

  • Preventing and Responding to High-Consequence Biological Threats

    A new report offers actionable recommendations for the international community to bolster prevention and response capabilities for high-consequence biological events.

  • The U.K. Government’s Preparedness for COVID-19: Risk-Management Lessons

    A new report from the U.K. National Audit Office (NAO) examines the government’s risk analysis, planning, and mitigation strategies prior to the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report notes that the pandemic has exposed a vulnerability to whole-system emergencies – that is, emergencies which are so broad that they require the engagement of the entire system.

  • Two-meter COVID-19 Rule Is “Arbitrary Measurement” of Safety

    A new study has shown that the airborne transmission of COVID-19 is highly random and suggests that the two-meter rule was a number chosen from a risk ‘continuum’, rather than any concrete measurement of safety.

  • Russian Anti-Vaccine Disinformation Campaign Backfires

    For more than a year, Russian-aligned troll factories overseeing thousands of social media accounts have been spreading anti-vaccine messages in an aggressive campaign to spread conspiracy theories and cast doubt on Western coronavirus vaccines. But the year-long offensive appears to have backfired. Russian officials now worry that the anti-vaccine skepticism encouraged by the troll factories has spilled over and is partly responsible for the high level of vaccine hesitancy among Russians.

  • News Manipulation by State Actors

    Did authoritarian regimes engage in news manipulation during the pandemic? How can such manipulation be brought to light? New report shows that both Russia and China appear to have employed information manipulation during the COVID-19 pandemic in service to their respective global agendas.

  • Public Health as National Security

    Experts agree that it is not a matter of if, but when, the next large-scale outbreak of infectious disease will occur. Even as more countries devote more resources to health security – defined as the framework for preventing, detecting, and responding to biological threats, whether naturally occurring, accidental, or deliberate – there are still disagreements about whether public health be framed as a national security issue.

  • Addressing Natural and Deliberate Biological Threats: Early Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

    “Infectious disease threats will continue to emerge, whether naturally, by accident, or deliberately. Stopping them from spreading and causing mass effects is possible even today, but we have much work to do bringing our assets to bear” said Andy Weber, Senior Fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR).

  • COVID-19: The Swedish Model

    In the spring of 2020, as it was deciding on what policies to take to deal with the spreading COVID-19 pandemic, the Swedish government chose a different path to many other countries, one based on a voluntary approach and personal responsibility rather than more intrusive measures. The Swedish government has created a commission of experts to assess whether the Swedish model of dealing with the pandemic was reasonable and effective.