Why anti-vaccine groups are running with Putin’s narrative
During the first day or two of the invasion of Ukraine, I checked the anti-vaccine telegram groups I monitor to see what they were talking about. At first, there wasn’t a huge amount of discussion about the war. The posts were still concerned with vaccines, with Covid, with moving to Zanzibar (more on that here) to escape regulations. But it quickly shifted.
Using narratives similar to the anti-vaccine disinformation they had been spreading throughout the pandemic, conspiracy-minded groups started promoting the line that the West’s condemnation of Putin’s war was part of a “great deception” or a “great reset” by a mythological deep state. It took only a day or two for the virtual world of anti-vaxxers to turn into a major pro-Putin platform.
In the real world, meanwhile, far-right politicians did something similar. In the days after the invasion, Austrian journalist Nadja Hahn, who monitors fringe and right-wing groups, watched a press conference held by the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), a far-right populist party that has been rallying against mandatory Covid vaccination.
“Everybody was talking about Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, and the FPÖ came out with Corona and vaccinations,” she said. The party then began to defend Putin’s invasion, advocating that we should listen to Russia. This pattern picked up and was repeated and intensified all over the world: anti-vaccine groups everywhere began to rally in favor of Vladimir Putin’s side in this war, suddenly adopting age-old Kremlin disinformation tropes that the U.S. was developing bioweapons on Russian borders, or that Putin was defending Russian sovereign land. They are regurgitating the #IStandWithPutin hashtag, and are supporting the invasion in the name of rejecting the official narrative.