How Russian Medical Disinformation Captured American Power.

Remember when Russian medical disinformation campaigns were so successful that Russia had to run a counter-disinformation campaign -against their own disinformation that had found its way back into Russia to convince its citizens that covid vaccines were safe?

Absurdly Rational remembers. Let’s explore that spectacular backfire, and examine how the Russians overcame it so effectively that they are now indirectly in charge of US health policy.

There is a widely-circulated, fake quote attributed to Nikita Khrushchev:

“We do not have to invade the United States, we will destroy you from within.”

While the quote has been shaped by those who have retold it for personal gain, its sentiment finds solid purchase in reality right now.

Any hostile foreign power drools over the strategic advantage of a sickened America fighting itself over well-established medical science. This is a doomsday-scenario seemingly too idiotic to sell to an educated population, and yet… we are living it now. A brilliantly-executed, decades-long propaganda campaign blossomed prior to the pandemic, and has continued to bear poisonous fruit faster than scientists leaving the US.

“Sherman, set the Way-Back Machine for 2020, mid-December.”

The pandemic was in full swing: hospitals were overwhelmed, their frontline workers exhausted. 300,000 Americans had already died of Covid-19. Devastated supply chains demanded that we re-use N-95 masks and improvise other forms of barrier protection, leaving many scared they would fall ill and infect their loved ones at home. It was a slow-march through disaster.

Thus, it is with vivid clarity that I recall the relief I felt on the night of my first vaccination. Only frontline workers were allotted vaccines, and all of us scrutinized the room to see who else was lining up for the then-scarce injection. Many of us were prepared to start a fight if we saw any administrators (who could work from home) rolling up their sleeves. We didn’t.

There were no antivax sentiments in that room packed with downtrodden workers sitting for mandatory post-injection observation. To the contrary, we shared a giddy relief that we had finally acquired protection far more substantial than our damp N95’s against the disease that we had watched cull more people than… anything. The sustained volume of suffering and death squashed any concerns about being the first in line for a novel mRNA vaccine. We were more than eager to stay late after a double shift to obtain immunity against a scourge that we had limited protection from.

And aside from a sore shoulder, going to work became a little easier.

So what happened?

How did we go from: “I will beat your ass while wearing a week-old mask if you cut ahead of me in the vaccination line,” to “I just don’t trust the science?” Contrary to populist slogans, this crisis of trust is NOT the fault of science -it is something far more sinister.

Disinformation is an infection. Like a virus, it penetrates those with poor defenses, and replicates explosively in its host, churning out infective particles of communication that take hold within any receptive minds nearby -which thanks to social media, is anyone on the planet with weak critical thinking skills who can parse your native tongue. Tuberculosis only wishes it could spread like disinformation.

While vaccination against covid drastically reduced its transmission, morbidity, and mortality -the virus of disinformation was out-spreading SARS-CoV-2 amongst the scientifically illiterate, and it was fouling the success of a US mass-vaccination campaign despite occurring in the midst of the deadliest outbreak of an infectious disease since World War I. It’s one thing for people to imagine that they don’t need to be vaccinated against polio because they are too sheltered to have ever been exposed to a single case of it, but its entirely another to see them rallying against the single best defense from a disease so deadly that it packed morgues beyond their capacity and damaged crematoriums under unprecedented demand.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

This was literal Orwell: life copying art without bothering to change anything to suppress suspicion. Everyone with an “I stand for medical freedom”-frame on their Facebook profile picture contended that vaccination was worse than the disease that was destroying crematoriums from overuse. That is a bold level of reality rejection.

In the post-vaccine era, I marveled at how nearly everyone in the ICU remained unvaccinated. How could they not want protection from a ventilator, bedside dialysis, and hundreds of drugs far more harmful (and expensive) than a vaccine? Nobody was hospitalized or dying of vaccination, while every ICU was bursting with “freedom-fighters.” Hospitals across the country shared the details of their censuses demonstrating that the unvaccinated were over 16 times more likely to die. Where were these holdouts getting their information, and why did they believe it more than facts and evidence from their own communities?

Russian disinformation had long-ago entered the chat

Russia is no stranger to propaganda. In fact, Russia remains the single most-studied foreign actor by the US. There has been keen domestic interest in Russian propaganda since the 1920’s -predating the origin of the internet by 50 years. Russia and the Soviet Union have been responsible for the most state-sponsored influence operations detected in the US information environment, so careful monitoring and action have been essential to national security for the better part of a century, up until early this year.

Given this history, it should not be surprising that Russian-aligned internet troll farms were busy producing antivax propaganda that was eagerly absorbed by those holding low-information or high-conspiracy stances on medicine, biological sciences, and pizza parlors.

Disinformation intellectually resonates most with the uninformed, the paranoid, the tribal partisans, and the iconoclasts who long to lord over true experts. Of greater concern are those who recognize disinformation for what it is -and choose to use it malevolently. It is a powerful tool in the hands of utilitarian non-believers, as it generates broad leverage for their ideological machinations. Bored social media engagement farmers also spread disinformation further as a means of entertainment. In each of these cases, the impact of disinformation is multiplied regardless of whether or not the holder of disinformation believes it or not, providing it a home across a huge swath of Americana.

The social restrictions of the pandemic created an unprecedented audience for the destructive pseudoscientific propaganda that Russia injected into the partisan echo chambers of social media, and many Americans became amplifiers of that messaging.

Who is best served by failing to protect US troops from infectious diseases, the US or Russia?

For reasons unknown, being antivax eventually crystallized as a conservative value. This is hilariously ironic given the crunchy-liberal origins of the modern US antivax movement, to say nothing of the fact that President Trump was responsible for fast-tracking covid vaccines in the first place. Appropriating a fear of injections from trust-fund hippies and calling it alpha-conservatism, is some of the most aggressively beta shit that I have ever witnessed.

Politicalization of foreign disinformation drove many to incorporate these beliefs into their deepest sense of identity, where it is much more difficult to challenge dispassionately. Believers paradoxically made vulnerability to diseases an issue of perceived strength, rather than one of diminished personal and community health. Being antivax has become a litmus test for being the best conservative you can be, despite the fact that George Washington and Ronald Reagan are famously pro-vaccine because of their rather ordinary ability to recognize that a diseased citizenry (and military) undermines the building and maintenance of a strong nation.

If I am ever conscripted to fight hand-to-hand against a proudly unvaccinated foreign power, I will preferentially seek out the battalions of neurologically-compromised polio victims, because no army in history ever performed a successful assault-breach from a wheelchair. Furthermore, the only soldier with severe respiratory disease known to be unmatched in melee combat was Darth Vader -and he isn’t real.

While this sounds ridiculous, these principles are constantly fed (without my added irony) to Americans who are eager to imagine that military forces shouldn’t be compelled to be vaccinated.

How effective was the Russian-inspired pandemic-era antivax movement?

Extremely. Russia’s activity in disseminating medical disinformation is not speculative. It is well-known, and their efforts are both savvy and prolific. While the extent of what is openly state-controlled, what is deniable, and what is amplified by the unwitting is purposely difficult to delineate, their collective influence has been profound.

The first sign of domestic susceptibility to covid-specific disinformation was Jan 30, 2021, when antivax protesters briefly shut the entrance to the Dodger Stadium mass-vaccination site for about an hour. Mildly annoying misbehavior, but that’s America, right?

By March of 2021, RFK Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense released “Medical Racism: The New Apartheid,” a film that specifically targeted Black audiences to avoid preventative health measures, claiming that they were already “naturally immune” to covid because “blacks have a powerful immune system,” and vaccines just aggravate it. I wish I was making this up. This is RFK Jr.’s take on making American healthy again by revisiting the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

While there are known, subtle ethnic differences in immune function, there is no evidence that African Americans are naturally immune to covid, nor more predisposed to complications from vaccination (they actually report fewer problems). African Americans are in fact more predisposed to infection and death from COVID-19 infections, largely due to socioeconomic determinants -one of which is taking bad medical advice from a propaganda movie made by a lawyer who is impervious to scientific nuance and statistical fact.

Finally, the viral disinformation that had impregnated every social media platform gave birth to gross political theater. Thousands of lawsuits were filed over vaccine mandates. Quacks testified in state and federal legislatures to share absolutely batshit-crazy fears of being magnetized by covid vaccines and grand delusions of persecution. Protests sprang up across the country to rebrand impenetrably confident ignorance as “medical freedom.”

Khrushchev laughs from his grave.

So… Russia won, right?

Yes, but they won so hard their victory circled back to bite them right in their memory B- and T-cells!

By October of 2021, Russia had a major problem. Mortality was trending sharply upwards, and officials were admitting to over 1,000 deaths per day (meaning there were far more than that), and yet their population remained extremely disinterested in being vaccinated.

Why? Because Russian citizens were secondarily picking up the very same antivax rhetoric that their government was broadcasting to destabilize the west, stalling domestic vaccine uptake at about 33% of their population. By comparison, 77% of the US population was vaccinated at this time, despite roiling US-antivax sentiments.

So Russia had to run an anti-disinformation campaign against their own disinformation campaign to save their own people. Sometimes life is stranger than fiction.

Remember when RFK Jr. was furious about being deplatformed from Instagram for spreading anti vaccine propaganda during the pandemic, yet he still went on to earn over $10M that year from his law firm, book deals, and special interest group CHD? I have never been politically oppressed with millions of dollars before, but I bet I could make it work.

If Kennedy had been an antivaxer in Russia at the same time, he would have been sentenced to 5 years in prison. Russia was not fucking around when it came to silencing idiots. Kennedy got a substantially better deal here in the US, even ignoring the fact that he later rode a wave of populist ignorance into power just a couple of years later.

Don’t believe the hype when RFK Jr. claims he was victimized by the government. His behavior would have led to brutal consequences in Russia -the land that shapes nearly all of his medical beliefs.

Wait… what?

To be clear: there is NO known evidence that RFK Jr. works for Russia. BUT… if you set aside the pro-vax messaging that Russia uses to magnify polarization among Americans, there is virtually no disagreement between RFK Jr.’s health beliefs and the anti-science messaging of known Russian disinformation.

The following crosswalk lists 14 positions that Secretary Kennedy and Russian propaganda hold in common, either identically or by gently repurposing disinformation to better fit domestic narratives. It includes links to his statements, and matches them with verified Russian disinformation claims from EUvsDisinfo, Wilson Center, and RAND archives.

All but the last items on Pharma are simply fictions. While Pharma is no better than any other large corporation that puts profit before beneficence, that doesn’t mean that we do not need their products. It’s rather nice to have access to chemo when one has treatable cancer. This flavor of disinformation intends to deepen distrust along reasonable lines, rather than weave an outright lie. Just because Pharma (like any other corporate entity you can think of) has greed-driven problems, it doesn’t mean we need to eradicate these industries -but that is exactly what a hostile foreign power would want you to think.

Don’t believe me? Try to reconcile why the party that wants to create a domestic manufacturing renaissance is absolutely trashing one of America’s few and most lucrative manufacturing sectors -pharmaceuticals. Running Moderna and Kenvue into the ground will not put America first nor Make America Healthy again; it will simply harm our economy and increase US reliance on foreign goods, which are sharply at odds with the expressed desires of this administration, and the sentiments of most Americans.

What does the future of US medicine look like under a health secretary who parrots Russian disinformation?

Bleak and burdened with disease that could have been prevented by retaining even a feeble grip on rationality.

The US Secretary of Health firmly holds beliefs that align with the same Russian health propaganda that has whispered in the ears of Americans for decades. This makes a certain kind of sense, given who he is: self-important and lacking any education or experience that is relevant to his post. Kennedy has indeed “done his own research,” but exclusively from a catalog of myths curated by Russian spymasters. In the absence of any familiarity with rudimentary science, he sourced his entire fund of knowledge from common disinformation scattered across the internet, in order to satisfy an relentless desire for confirmation bias. A barber is legally required to have more familiarity with hair than the Secretary of Health has with health.

If you think it can’t get any worse than this, you simply don’t appreciate the power at Kennedy’s disposal -particularly given the neutered oversight he has received from a legislature of individuals who have internalized much of the same propaganda.

RFK Jr. is systematically terminating every single expert from every area of health and biology that requires expert management. Food safety. Medical research. Clinical trials. Fact-based vaccine guidelines. Safe nursing care. Prevention and treatment of substance abuse. Public health reporting to guide clinical decision making. Public health in general. Suicide prevention. Cancer research. Most shockingly: biosurveillance and response -which has created a perpetual national security threat. All of this has crumbled rapidly under Kennedy’s delusional reign. These are not the cuts of patriotic fiscal responsibility -they are acts of sabotage that surrender enormous advantages to competitors and enemies alike, by crippling our physical and economic health.

Kennedy’s appalling mis-education has turned the fictional medical narratives of our adversaries into federally-enforced policies. That should alarm everyone -particularly conservative Republicans who historically identify Russia as a prime threat to national security.

A midterm shift in partisan balance or even an impeachment will not put everything back together again -not because too much has been lost, but because too much of the population has succumbed to fiercely-held belief in disinformation tailored to make them feel entitled to their own personal truth about biology. This will stall timely corrections as intellectually-compromised citizens continue to vote against their own best interests in favor of the sentiments of their facebook mom-groups and untethered alt-news blogs -all of which are directly or indirectly informed by targeted foreign disinformation.

Barring a miraculous act of integrity-driven leadership or population-based epiphany, national focus will remain severely disrupted. The US will continue to be distracted by everything from accelerating outbreaks of previously-eradicated diseases to counter-productive ultra-polarized partisan battles. America will bleed attention away from global interests for decades to come, ceding dominance to countries run by both good and bad actors who simply share a better appreciation for objective reality.

It gets worse before it gets worse.

I began researching this months before the 2024 election, because combating medical disinformation is a personal passion. I came across a document outlining the US understanding of Russian disinformation networks, detailing how they affect citizens, and to a lesser extent, how the US defends against it. It was called “Russia’s Pillars of Disinformation and Propaganda,” and it’s where I sourced the GEC slide featured earlier in this article.

I am using the past tense because a few weeks after the inauguration, the link to that document ceased to function:

https://www.state.gov/russias-pillars-of-disinformation-and-propaganda-report/

I was relieved that I saved a local copy of the document, but was chilled that the State Department suddenly changed a century-old stance on viewing Russia as a disseminator of disinformation -just days into a new administration. I was able to find it in an archive a few weeks later, but the fact that this document was deprioritized remains ominous. Is Russia our friend now? Is that how it escaped tariffs? Is it because so many Americans have embraced the medical teachings of those who would do us harm and revel in our collapse? Is objective truth to be determined by popular vote or subjectively by the personal whims of any one individual?

The answer to those questions is… I have no idea. I’m a doctor, not a statesman. I only know that in the complete absence of US countermeasures to disinformation -which appears to be our current status, lies will flow unabated, swaying the electorate to vote for ever-crazier health-leaders who will enshrine madness into law. The leaders are only a symptom of a larger problem with citizens, never more obvious than when the death of one’s own child by those policies prove insufficient to convince a parent that they have been duped. That would sound far-fetched if it didn’t already happen in Texas earlier this year.

What could possibly be worse than not caring that your daughter died as a result of your uninformed decision-making? We are locked into an accelerating trajectory to find out. See you at the impact site.