A sinister infection of disinformation was...

[Michael Grove]

... spreading at the same time as the virus.

[Michael Grove]

A Russian disinformation campaign was spreading on far-right discussion forums targeting vaccines and the Biden administration. The 2021 campaign aimed to spread skepticism and fear of vaccines, while also implying that the Biden-Harris administration was forcing vaccinations as some sort of an evil plot, rather than a life-saving solution to a raging pandemic.

As we wrote recently in The Rolling Insurrection: How Putin is Waging a Covert War Against ... Russia is engaged in active measures against the West to cause chaos and destabilization. In particular, Russia emphasizes cognitive warfare, where the human mind is the battlefield.

“They know that they can't go to war overtly,” said Keir Giles, author of Russia’s War On Everybody. “And that’s where all of these covert, sub-threshold, grey zone, so-called hybrid attacks come in. Because that is how Russia has been reaching out to harm the West. It knows that if it is in open warfare, the result is a foregone conclusion that it will be disastrous for Russia.

“In every single other possible domain of waging war, Russia has already been convinced for a long time that it is in a state of conflict with the West, and it's behaving accordingly. So all of the different levers of power that it can use to attack us, it has been using,” he said. “That's the part which I think has not been sufficiently recognized even after this war on Ukraine started — whether it's economic or cyber or disinformation warfare, or public health campaigns of subversion… it's all been ongoing.”

Heidi Cuda - BYLINE Supplement