Infodemic: Madagascar children forced to take fake Covid-19 cure; global vaccine campaigns in crisis
Welcome! We are tracking how global disinformation is shaping the world emerging from the Covid-19 lockdown. Today, we go from Lebanon to Indonesia and Madagascar, as we explore narratives — both real and fake — that have caught our attention and deserve yours.
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“We are back to the stone age,” a friend from Lebanon wrote to me yesterday. “No oil, no gas, no food, no money. It’s going to be a hard winter.” And now, on top of the pandemic and a near-total economic collapse, the nation's trash crisis — a problem that has had some Band-Aid fixes over the past couple of years, but never been properly solved — is set to spill over again. The state is falling apart, public services are failing and, earlier this week, 131 workers contracted to a private waste-management firm were diagnosed with the virus, forcing the company to quarantine its entire workforce.
There has been an alarming drop in the number of children who are receiving life-saving vaccines around the world. A joint survey by the World Health Organization and UNICEF has found that the likelihood that a child born today will get all the needed vaccines by the time she reaches the age of five is less than 20 percent. The pandemic is also threatening at least 30 measles vaccination campaigns, which could result in further outbreaks in 2020 and beyond. “We cannot trade one health crisis for another,” said UNICEF’s executive director Henrietta Fore.
Meanwhile in Mexico, a fake article about the WHO has said that the organization "considers pedophilia as normal." The link was shared nearly 6,000 times. The piece also said that the "WHO has become an avid advocate for the left" and argued against sex education. The most loyal Infodemic readers among you might remember that, a month or so ago, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro came out with similar statements. Back then, we explained how we traced the origins of these claims back to the Kremlin. Interesting to see them pop up again in Mexico, and a reminder of how some lies are stickier than others.