The Russian “Infodemic” Is About More Than Just Elections

Nice picture, comrade, but the coronavirus is coming for you too.Alexei Druzhinin/Kremlin Pool/Planet Pix via ZUMA

This story is infuriating:

As the pandemic has swept the globe, it has been accompanied by a dangerous surge of false information — an “infodemic,” according to the World Health Organization. Analysts say that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has played a principal role in the spread of false information as part of his wider effort to discredit the West and destroy his enemies from within.

….His agents have repeatedly planted and spread the idea that viral epidemics — including flu outbreaks, Ebola and now the coronavirus — were sown by American scientists. The disinformers have also sought to undermine faith in the safety of vaccines, a triumph of public health that Mr. Putin himself promotes at home.

….The Russian president has waged his long campaign by means of open media, secretive trolls and shadowy blogs that regularly cast American health officials as patronizing frauds. Of late, new stealth and sophistication have made his handiwork harder to see, track and fight.

….Sandra C. Quinn, a professor of public health at the University of Maryland who has followed Mr. Putin’s vaccine scares for more than a half-decade, said the Russian president was drawing on an old playbook. “The difference now is the speed with which it spreads, and the denigration of the institutions that we rely on to understand the truth,” she said in an interview. “I think we’re in dangerous territory.”

I imagine this kind of thing was common on both sides during the Cold War, and that’s the era that defined Putin’s worldview. But it’s still a little beyond belief that even a wily thug like Putin would keep up this kind of rubbish more than three decades after the wall came down. This stuff doesn’t just damage America, it damages the entire world. Hell, it probably even damages Russia in the long run. What stupidity.