US, China and Russia engage in a vaccine battle in Latin America
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QAnon watch: Next Tuesday marks the 6-month anniversary of the Capitol insurrection in Washington D.C. On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland security released a bulletin warning of more extremist violence as Covid restrictions lift. As we have previously reported, QAnon is not going anywhere. Already, 38 congressional candidates who express support for the movement have announced they’re running for Congress in the 2022 midterms. Don’t forget, there are already two QAnon-sympathizers in Congress. On Wednesday, Colorado congresswoman and Q-follower Lauren Boebert advised her followers: “the easiest way to make the Delta variant go away is to turn off CNN.” Boebert represents Mesa County in Colorado, where case numbers are the highest in the state, and where the Delta variant is present in 90% of cases.
Hindi fake news slips through the net: Social media companies like Twitter and Facebook are not paying enough attention to Covid-19 misinformation in Hindi, in a country where over 44% speak the language, according to India-based newsroom The Wire. Reaching over 100 million users, out of the identified 150 misleading posts about Covid-19 during the deadly second wave in April and May, less than 10 were flagged as misinformation or removed by the platform by June. Only 15 posts pointed to reliable sources. Facebook has been criticized for its lack of due diligence in monitoring of foreign-language posts in the past, perhaps most prominently when the platform failed to counter hate speech against the Rohingya in Myanmar groups in 2018. At the time, the social media giant had only two Burmese-speakers moderating content from the entire country.
In Venezuela, criminal networks are taking advantage of a thriving black market for stealing and reselling Covid vaccine doses and hawking for fake vaccines. In the western state of Lara, a health department employee was arrested on June 26 for filling vials with painkillers, antibiotics and boiling water only to sell them as Covid shots on social media. She was part of a group of four people who sold almost 2,000 “doses”, claiming them to be Sputnik or Sinopharm jabs, charging up to $150 per dose. Gangs selling stolen, unrefrigerated and expired vaccines have sprung up on WhatsApp, while oxygen tanks and the anti-viral drug Remdesivir are also being sold on the black market.