[Last year, the anti-extremism group Center for Countering Digital
Hate found that 65 percent of vaccine disinformation on Facebook and
Twitter came from just 12 people, including the activist Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. and the natural lifestyle influencer Dr. Joseph Mercola. ]
[[link removed]]

HOW AMERICAN INFLUENCERS BUILT A WORLD WIDE WEB OF VACCINE
DISINFORMATION  
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Kiera Butler and Neha Wadekar

Mother Jones
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*
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_ Last year, the anti-extremism group Center for Countering Digital
Hate found that 65 percent of vaccine disinformation on Facebook and
Twitter came from just 12 people, including the activist Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. and the natural lifestyle influencer Dr. Joseph Mercola. _


, Grace Molteni/Mother Jones; Getty

 

Facts matter: Sign up
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our print magazine.

Last year, Saphinah Kenyando was struggling to decide whether to get
vaccinated against Covid. Kenyando, who is 38 and teaches chemistry
and biology at a high school in Kenya, had read about horrifying side
effects—blood clots, long-term disabilities—that sounded worse
than the virus itself. She watched a (possibly doctored) clip from
former US President Donald Trump saying that the effects included
gruesome facial deformities that develop as a person ages. And she
wondered whether the rumors circulating on Facebook, WhatsApp, and
YouTube were true—that a person could take the jab and drop dead
shortly thereafter.

In addition to her academic role, Kenyando also serves as the school
chess coach, a duty she takes very seriously. She believes the game
imparts valuable lessons to students: Make the right move, and
you’ll reap the benefits. Make the wrong one, and you’ll be forced
to deal with the fallout. “Chess is life,” she says. “Every
decision we make in life is about the game of chess.” That’s how
Kenyando framed her own decision on whether to get herself and her
children vaccinated against Covid. She decided to hold off until she
had more information.

Saphinah enjoys a game of chess with her son Adrian at the Camel Park
Hotel, Kisii County. She is Chess Kenya’s Nyanza
coordinator. Lameck Orina

The misleading posts Kenyando had seen were just a small portion of
the avalanche of disinformation that flowed through social media in
Kenya as the pandemic intensified and the virus infiltrated the
households of everyday Kenyans. Wanja Kimani, a house cleaner in
Nairobi, read that the vaccine could cause mental illness. Lucy
Wambui, a human rights activist in Nairobi, heard that Covid doesn’t
exist in the slum where she lives and concluded that the vaccine is a
way to control populations in neighborhoods like hers. She warned her
own elderly father that he shouldn’t get vaccinated.

In the United States, the proliferation of disinformation about Covid
vaccines and treatments has been widely publicized, and most of these
myths come from a few powerful influencers. Last year, the
anti-extremism group Center for Countering Digital Hate found
[[link removed]] that 65 percent of
vaccine disinformation on Facebook and Twitter came from just 12
people, including the activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the natural
lifestyle influencer Dr. Joseph Mercola. The target audience, the
media reports, is in bastions of American conservatism—in rural
communities
[[link removed]],
among evangelical Christians
[[link removed]],
and among Trump
[[link removed]] voters.

But there is increasing evidence that American vaccine disinformation
campaigns don’t stop at the borders. Over the last year, global
public health experts have documented rising rates of vaccine
hesitancy in other parts of the world, from Africa
[[link removed](21)00563-5/fulltext] to South
Asia
[[link removed]],
from Eastern Europe
[[link removed]] to South
America
[[link removed]].
While some disinformation is locally sourced, these experts have
traced many of the myths to American anti-vaccine activists who create
an onslaught of social media content at virtually no cost, says Imran
Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, based in
Washington, DC, and the United Kingdom. They can afford to “flood
the zone and see what sticks.” In the United States, it might be a
patriotic meme about how vaccine mandates are a form of government
overreach; in other parts of the world, a post that plays up
historical distrust of Western interference into local communities
might gain more traction. Each piece of disinformation has a way of
finding “the right audience,” Ahmed says, “like a homing
missile.”

Covid didn’t create vaccine skepticism. The health experts we spoke
to described how anti-vaccine groups began sowing the seeds of
distrust in the developing world long before the pandemic. But much as
in the United States, what started as a fringe phenomenon in many
countries has been gaining momentum. The biggest worry is that this
rising tide of vaccine hesitancy could undo 100 years of progress in
combating the spread of infectious disease, bringing back polio,
measles, and many other easily preventable deadly illnesses. Angus
Thomson, who studies vaccine disinformation as a senior social
scientist with UNICEF, is alarmed by reports worldwide. “It’s
painting a global picture, and it feels like we’re climate
scientists in the early days,” he said. “You get the distinct
feeling that there is a massive sea change occurring.”

In 2019, Steven Lloyd Wilson
[[link removed]], an
assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University who studies
disinformation, was invited by a colleague to participate in a World
Health Organization conference about vaccine hesitancy. At the time,
he was only vaguely aware of the anti-vaccine movement, and what he
knew of it was mostly based in the United States. “I’m a political
scientist. I’m looking at political issues,” he said. “It just
wasn’t on my radar—anti-vaccination is a public health thing. This
isn’t political.”

“It feels like we’re climate scientists in the early days. You get
the distinct feeling that there is a massive sea change
occurring.” 

Nevertheless, one of his colleagues persuaded him to launch a study
about the influence of foreign disinformation on vaccine acceptance
around the world. In February 2020, he teamed up with a doctor in
South Africa to collect and analyze negative social media posts about
vaccines and compare that data with vaccination rates and attitudes. 

Wilson wasn’t anticipating much to come out of the analysis. “I
expected there to be some little statistically significant effect,”
he recalled. So he was floored when the study
[[link removed]] ultimately found that
negative vaccine posts were highly correlated with both skepticism of
vaccines and declining vaccination rates all over the world. “We
were very happy that our research design really worked,” he said.
“And simultaneously very disappointed in the state of the world,
that this was something real and worldwide.” 

In part, the breathtaking success of worldwide anti-vaccination
campaigns is due to the fact that there is an entire, incredibly
lucrative cottage industry
[[link removed]] devoted
to pumping out vaccine disinformation. Many of the most successful
anti-vaccine activists rake in advertising money from their popular
YouTube channels; some further enrich themselves through sales of
supplements, detox regimens, and other wellness products, the Center
for Countering Digital Hate has found
[[link removed]]. Social media makes
it cheap and easy to reach international customers—and international
versions of popular social media platforms lack
[[link removed]] even
the basic disinformation censors found in American versions.
Children’s Health Defense, the prominent and influential
anti-vaccine group led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., recently launched
a European version [[link removed]] of its site.
Joseph Mercola, the influential anti-vaccine osteopath
[[link removed]],
offers Spanish [[link removed]] and French
[[link removed]] editions of his site; his videos have
been translated into many languages, according to
[[link removed]] the _New
York Times_. In a 2017 affidavit, Mercola reported
[[link removed]] his
net worth to be in excess of $100 million. 

American influencers’ messages often resonate with communities that
seem to have little in common with the United States, says Joe Smyser,
CEO of  Public Good Projects, a nonprofit in Washington, DC, that
collaborates with UNICEF on studying vaccine hesitancy. Recently, his
team followed the path of an American op-ed criticizing pandemic
restrictions from its origin in the United States all the way to East
Timor, where it took off on local social media. And when Kentucky
Republican Sen. Rand Paul said he opposed government vaccine mandates,
“that got a lot of traction in social networks across Vietnam,”
Smyser says. “It was used to push back against the Vietnamese
government and Vietnamese public health officials.”

But there is another reason that anti-vaccine content finds its way
around the world, with consequences even more dangerous and pervasive
than those from anti-vaccine activists. In his study, Wilson’s team
found that foreign governments—particularly Russia—were amplifying
all kinds of messages both in support of and against vaccines. This is
a well-established destabilization tactic that leverages social media
to polarize an entire population around a particularly contentious
issue—Russia used it
[[link removed]] to
undermine the 2016 US presidential election, for example. The point
isn’t to promote any single viewpoint; it’s to sow chaos. “A lot
of the time, you’ll have bots pushing six completely contradictory,
mutually exclusive stories,” Wilson says. “But what unifies all of
them is trying to get people to throw up their hands and say, ‘I
guess it’s impossible to know what the truth is.’” 

Just as Wilson was wrapping up his study, the pandemic began—and
suddenly, his research took on new meaning and urgency. Around the
world, social media channels were flooded with wild claims about the
new disease and the tools to fight it. He watched in horror as
powerful people—even heads of state
[[link removed]]—amplified
the “disinformation campaigns online that have managed to blow it
vastly out of the original proportion of a few individuals who were
hardcore believers.” 

Public Good Project/Nimbus Capture

Which narrative takes off in any given country depends on the culture
and history of the place. In May 2020, Kenyan evangelical pastor Fred
Akama posted a rant
[[link removed]] on
Facebook, which began “THE GATES OF BILL SHALL NOT PREVAIL.” Bill
Gates “predicted that a viral pandemic would hit the world,” the
post continued, with the clear implication that the philanthropist was
somehow complicit in and profiting from the creation and spread of
Covid. Akama also accused Gates of having unethically close ties with
the World Health Organization and vaccine producers and called him an
enemy of the Christian faith. He has more than 15,000 followers on
Facebook. 

Akama wasn’t the only social media influencer in Kenya warning about
Bill Gates’ motives. “If you look at the kind of stuff that is
circulating in East Africa…you find that the content seems to be
very similar,” says Eric Mugendi, who works at Meedan, a San
Francisco–based technology nonprofit supporting fact-checking and
verification of organizations. “The kind of language that was being
used and the types of people who were spreading it—a lot of times it
was religious leaders,” Mugendi says, arguing that anti-vaxxers
often link their arguments to Gates and liberal philanthropist George
Soros. They accuse them of wanting to test vaccines’ efficacy on
Africans, profit from vaccine sales, control the human population
through microchipping, and prevent the growth of the African
population. 

“The unifying factor is encouraging distrust of elites and experts
and Westerners on any level.”

Disinformation campaigns that play up nefarious motives of powerful
people are common worldwide. In the United States, a widely shared
video called _Plandemic_
[[link removed]] popularized
the conspiracy theory about Gates early in the pandemic. This strain
of disinformation is particularly effective in Africa because of
deep-seated anxiety that Western governments want to slow population
growth in the developing world, notes Wilson of Brandeis University.
“The unifying factor is encouraging distrust of elites and experts
and Westerners on any level,” he says. 

Ultraconservative groups in Africa have a long history of spinning a
variety of Gates conspiracy theories. The anti-abortion movement in
Africa has employed this tactic for at least a decade. In a 2017
article in _Pacific Standard_, Kathryn Joyce reported
[[link removed]] on a prominent
Nigerian anti-abortion activist Obianuju Ekeocha, who in 2012 spoke
out against
[[link removed]] a
Gates Foundation contraceptives campaign. American anti-choice groups
helped Ekeocha create a new group, Culture of Life Africa. This
complemented an ongoing campaign by Human Life International, a
hardline US anti-abortion group operating around the world. Its
mission? To spread the message
[[link removed]] that
“Western governments and NGOs are using great sums of money and
influence to destroy the traditionally life-loving African culture.”

There’s a convergence these days between seemingly unrelated public
health issues, as many of the same US-sponsored organizations that
oppose abortion have pivoted their messaging to address Covid
vaccinations. One such group is CitizenGO, an ultraconservative
petition mill with outposts worldwide. CitizenGO Africa, whose
anti-abortion work _Mother Jones_ covered here
[[link removed]],
is led by a Kenyan woman named Ann Kioko, who was trained in workshops
by the American Leadership Institute, a conservative organization that
counts former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.),
and Karl Rove among its distinguished alumni. 

In 2020, CitizenGo posted an online petition
[[link removed]] titled
“Bill Gates and WHO: Hands Off Africa” intended to send a “firm
message to the Bill Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization
that Africa is not a test lab, Africans are people with human dignity
and Africans will not be used to try vaccines whose purpose is not
known.” The petition accuses Gates of having Covid vaccines
“tested on Africa as he stages them [vaccines] as the only solution
to the pandemic.” It also accuses Bill and Melinda Gates of
attempting to control the African population via contraception and
abortion. “Melinda Gates told the _Washington Post_ she is
frustrated with the Trump administration’s decision to cut funding
for international ‘reproductive-rights projects,’ (READ ABORTION)
calling it ‘incredibly disappointing,’” the petition read. 

In some ways, the extreme paranoia about birth control efforts could
be understandable, given the legacy of the staggering violence of
colonialism in Africa—and that history of exploitation continually
undermines public health campaigns. But it was a specific strain of
disinformation about a tetanus vaccine that allowed rumors about
secret forced sterilization to flourish. Alphonce Shiundu, the Kenya
editor of Africa Check, a fact-checking nonprofit that promotes
accuracy in public debates and the media, says his organization
has traced
[[link removed]] the
origins of this myth to an event in 1994. Researchers in India were
“developing a contraceptive vaccine to help women prevent unplanned
pregnancy.” Its active ingredient was part of a hormone called human
chorionic gonadotropin, known as hCG, which is produced during
pregnancy. To make the vaccine, researchers “coupled hCG to a
protein similar to the tetanus toxin.” When a woman was jabbed, her
immune system would fight both the protein and the hCG hormone, an
Africa Check report recounted. 

Although this contraceptive vaccine was completely unrelated to the
tetanus vaccine, the American anti-abortion group Human Life
International leveraged
[[link removed]] the
research from India and used it to mount a disinformation campaign in
Mexico, the Philippines, and Nicaragua, claiming that the tetanus
vaccine alone would reduce a woman’s fertility without her
knowledge. 

The World Health Organization tried to quash the rumors and followed
up with extensive independent testing and found that, “without
exception, when interpreted by independent laboratory staff, including
those in the Philippines that conducted the original tests which
started the rumor, all samples of tetanus toxoid vaccine have proved
negative for hCG.”

“If tetanus toxoid vaccines given to millions of women in many
countries were capable of causing infertility there would by now be
ample demographic data to confirm this. We know of no such data.”

Even MaterCare International, a group of Catholic obstetricians and
gynecologists, issued a statement
[[link removed]] saying,
“If tetanus toxoid vaccines given to millions of women in many
countries were capable of causing infertility there would by now be
ample demographic data to confirm this. We know of no such data.”

But the damage was done.

Fast-forward two decades: In 2014, the Kenya Catholic Bishops
Association fought vigorously
[[link removed]] against
a tetanus vaccination campaign in the country. Perhaps the most
prominent anti-vaxxer was Dr. Stephen Karanja, previously the chair of
the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association. (In addition to his assault on
the tetanus vaccine, Karanja opposed
[[link removed]] schoolgirls being
vaccinated against cervical cancer, arguing that the human
papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine was unnecessary because it affected those
“whose lifestyle involves irresponsible sexual behaviors.”) And in
2019, a Facebook post
[[link removed]] by
a Kenyan user that was made to look like a news article made the
rounds in Kenya, announcing: “Abortion drugs discovered in Bill
Gates’ vaccines. UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation have been accused of secretly sterilizing
millions of women in Africa by doctors in Kenya after abortion drugs
were discovered in tetanus [vaccines].” 

Unsurprisingly, when Covid vaccines became available in Kenya in 2021,
Karanja came out vehemently against them, recommending
hydroxychloroquine tablets instead. He died of complications from
Covid last year. Karanja’s death didn’t stop other Kenyan
influencers from running with his infertility narrative. Public health
experts are trying hard to counter it, but they have found time and
again that the distrust of the West has staying power, says Shiundu.
“The anti-vaccination movement just keeps harping on it and just
keeps redirecting it every time.” 

Now, in Kenya and other parts of the developing world, public health
experts worry that anti-vaccine activists will leverage fear and
uncertainty around Covid vaccines to undermine long-standing and
highly effective vaccination programs in the developing world. There
are signs of this happening already, even as global nonprofits are
fighting the disinformation at its source. UNICEF and the Public Good
Projects have teamed up to monitor and report new strains of vaccine
disinformation as they emerge with a surveillance tool called
the Vaccination Demand Observatory [[link removed]].
On their public dashboard, which is updated weekly, anyone can see
examples of social media posts making false claims about vaccines. In
April, the VDO dashboard reported upticks in disinformation around the
vaccines for cholera in Bangladesh, rotavirus in Egypt, and typhoid in
Nepal. That trend is particularly worrying in the context of
pandemic-related disruptions in routine vaccination programs.
According to the World Health Organization, as of May 2022,
vaccination campaigns in 43 countries are still postponed. In April,
WHO warned
[[link removed]] of
a “perfect storm” of conditions for a measles outbreak, noting
that in many countries an uptick in cases had already begun.

In Kenya, vaccine denial and rejection also fosters a dangerous
economy of charlatans “selling health misinformation,” says
Mugendi of Meedan. The Kenyan health system is biased toward the rich.
Those who can afford good treatment buy it. Those who can’t, take
shortcuts. People try dangerous treatments to find a silver-bullet
cure at low cost, which creates an underground market of false cures
and false hope. It also “makes people question genuine actors in the
space,” Mugendi says.

“I was told that when you’re injected, exactly after four months
you will die.”

Disinformation thrives even in rural places with limited access to
social media. Hayi Hassan, 62, and Hussein Ali, 75, are Somali animal
herders living in Northeast Kenya who didn’t get the vaccine because
they’d heard it could cause blood clots or death. “I was told that
when you’re injected, exactly after four months you will die,” Ali
says. Neither of them believes Covid is serious. “I haven’t seen
any people dying in Garissa town, so I’m probably safe,” he says.
What’s more, as elders, they figure they’ll likely die soon
anyway. At their age, the idea of walking 37 miles in the blazing sun
to get to the nearest hospital for a jab they think they don’t need
sounds ludicrous.  

Through word of mouth, says Public Good Project’s Smyser,
anti-vaccine messages take on a life of their own. In one case study
in Papua New Guinea, the team looked at the spread of vaccine
disinformation in a remote village. “Nobody had a phone, except for
one guy who used to climb up to the top of the hill, and climb a tree,
and hold the phone up, and download a bunch of stuff,” Smyser
recalled. “And then he’d bring it back down and the whole village
would read it.” 

Public Good Project/Nimbus Capture

The very ubiquity of these rumors makes combating them a challenge.
Yet some fact-checking agencies report that they have made modest
progress. On a recent day, the Vaccine Demand Observatory’s tool
reviewing social media posts included one on false claims about Covid
vaccines for children in Vietnam, another about rumors about vaccine
dangers promoted by Bangladeshi politicians, and another on
disinformation about the safety of Covid vaccines for older adults in
East Timor. This kind of surveillance isn’t for the general public
as much as for researchers, who can learn a lot from tracking the
paths of disinformation in real time.

The global development nonprofit IREX has developed media literacy
curricula that it tailors to individual countries. “It’s going to
look different depending on the content and the context, geography,
culture,” says Katya Vogt, the director of the project. “You
can’t just create one multi-use tool.” In Ukraine, for instance,
the group worked within the school system, weaving lessons on how to
identify disinformation tactics into the literature, social studies,
and history lessons. In Tunisia and Jordan, the program administrators
determined that it would be more effective to train youth leaders to
teach groups of their peers and create their own social media content
about spotting disinformation. 

In Kenya, nonprofits are working to improve media and digital
literacy. Africa Check has hired a slew of Fact Ambassadors to promote
accurate information through Kenya’s social media and other
channels. Those ambassadors “will come back to us with anecdotes
about how they sent something to one of their relatives in a WhatsApp
group who kept on sending all these conspiracy theories and treatment
regimens for Covid-19,” says Shiundu of Africa Check. “And these
people, after they reluctantly read, they were exposed to accurate
information, and they slowly updated their beliefs.” 

Saphinah at the Camel Park Hotel in Kisii county. Lameck Orina

Saphinah talks to small scale traders about the COVID 19 vaccine at
the Ekerorano Trading Centre in Kisii county, Kenya. Lameck Orina

Last year, Kenyando, the school teacher who wavered on the Covid
vaccine, was virtually introduced to Peter Ongera, a Fact Ambassador,
who helped correct some of the misinformation and disinformation
she’d absorbed over the past two years. Kenyando had another
compelling reason to get the jab: One of her students had qualified
for the African Individual School chess championship, and Kenyando
needed to be vaccinated to travel to Ghana, where the tournament would
be held. 

Kenyando got the shot. Then she took her children to get vaccinated.
“I took them having done my own analysis,” she says. She listed
her reasoning as wanting to “protect myself and family because of
the nature of [my] work. As a teacher and sports lady I interact with
so many people,” and because it “was a requirement from the
employer to have all teachers vaccinated.”

But she worries that the same myths she saw are still circulating.
“The falsehoods about the Covid vaccine, much of it was online,”
she says. “There is power in information. Irrespective of how it
comes, the first moment that somebody gets the information, they take
it as the true Gospel.” 

_KIERA BUTLER is a senior editor at Mother Jones. For more of her
stories, click here
[[link removed]]._

_NEHA WADEKAR is a freelance journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her
writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the New York
Times, among other publications._

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