China and Russia’s plot to undermine COVID vaccine rollout
Experts have analysed how China and Russia are trying to undermine the COVID-19 vaccination rollout in Australia and across the world.
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China and Russia are overtly and covertly trying to undermine the COVID-19 vaccination rollout in Western countries, like Australia.
Their aim is to prolong the chaos caused by the virus, undermine confidence in governments, promote their own vaccines as a diplomatic tool and even steal research, cybersecurity experts claim.
Australian researcher Ariel Bogle, who studied social media posts on vaccines, uncovered a staggering amount of disinformation — including the panning of our jab suppliers.
“Some colleagues of mine in 2020 looked at some efforts, apparently by Russia-linked actors undermining the AstraZeneca vaccine and so, in January, we noticed this uptick in discussion of the Pfizer vaccine so we took a closer look,” she said.
“It became pretty clear … as various vaccine candidates emerged that they would become a kind of political tool, as well as a health tool, as a way to kind of broadcast scientific achievement for their country.”
Ms Bogle cited the example of a tweet by a reporter for China’s state-owned broadcaster CGTN, who dramatised reports Norwegian aged care residents died after receiving the Pfizer vaccine, asking whether European media had picked up the story.
“Not that I can see,” the reporter tweeted. “Imagine if 13 people are assessed to have died from Chinese-made #vaccines, it would have made headlines EVERYWHERE!”
The reporter then tweeted two screenshots of headlines about 10 potential Pfizer vaccine-linked deaths in Germany — overlooking that they may have passed away from natural causes and that 800,000 others had been successfully vaccinated.
“Both tweets were retweeted by Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, who has more than 877,000 followers,” Ms Bogle, of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said.
The Alliance for Securing Democracy recently analysed more than 35,000 vaccine-related messages from Russian, Chinese, and Iranian diplomats, government officials, and state media outlets on Twitter, YouTube, and state-sponsored news websites.
“Russia provided by far the most negative coverage of Western vaccines, with a remarkable 86 per cent of surveyed Russian tweets mentioning Pfizer and 76 per cent of tweets mentioning Moderna coded as negative,” the Alliance’s report found.
It also noted that when British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab accused Russia of running a disinformation campaign to destroy the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine last year, multiple Russian sources suggested the vaccine could turn people into monkeys due to its use of a chimpanzee virus.
At that time, the British vaccine was viewed as the major competitor to Russia’s Sputnik V, but when the UK researchers entered talks about sharing Russian vaccine ingredients for the AstraZeneca vaccine, the coverage turned positive.
“China also played up the notion that its vaccines were the target of an anti-Chinese smear campaign. This theme ranged from conspiratorial messaging about hidden agendas to more standard allegations of Western “bias against China,” the report said.
Chief Information Security Officer at BlackBerry John McClurg, who has worked at Honeywell the FBI, CIA the US Department of Defence, said it is likely Russia and China are also using bots and sophisticated third parties on the dark web to do this.
“If there is an instability associated with a fear they can introduce into the environment so that the population is less likely to embrace and voluntarily engage and get the vaccine, that perpetuates the time in which the disruption that the COVID is causing will continue,” he said.
“Who can control the chaos and complexity has a leg up in terms of ultimate victory.”
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