|
I have dealt with antivaxxers several times in my blog, and I have made my position clear. All the evidence we have indicates that vaccines work and have saved many lives, including the COVID-19 vaccines. I consider that by promoting vaccine hesitancy or avoidance, antivaxxers are harming and even killing people who delay or forfeit potentially life-saving vaccines. Some of the antivaxxers I’ve butted heads with in social media seem to be individuals that, no matter how misguided, are convinced of their position. These individuals respond to my criticism and engage in debates. However, others are nothing but opportunists who are not interested in countering rebuttals of their position. These characters just traffic in likes and shares of what they post, and in the number of comments they receive regardless of their nature. They don’t necessarily believe in antivaxxer arguments, they just use them to grow their accounts, which have tens to hundreds of thousands of followers. In between these two types of antivaxxers is a third kind who is halfway between the previous two. The accounts of these characters have a few hundreds to thousands of followers, and they are very active posting, liking, and sharing vaccine misinformation. They will occasionally respond to criticism, but they will seldom carry on an argument for more than one or two posts. Most importantly, I’ve noticed that they coordinate to like and share each other’s posts, and what they write at times seems to have an odd grammatical structure and choice of words, as though their first language were not English. I have been told that these accounts belong to foreign operatives who are promoting antivaxxer sentiment in the United States and other things to disrupt our society. The concept is not so farfetched as we know for a fact that Russian operatives posted on social media to influence our elections and create chaos. But without specific proof, this is just another conspiracy theory. As many of those who follow my posts know, I have also criticized those who spread conspiracy theories, but what is often lost in the heat of the arguments is that I am talking about unfounded conspiracy theories. I accept the fact that there have been conspiracies promoted by the government or other organizations, and I accept that there may be such activities currently going on, but I have always stressed that you need to have evidence to correctly identify them as such before claiming that there is a conspiracy. Acting otherwise is irresponsible. It is with this in mind that I was surprised to learn about a conspiracy by the US government to spread antivaxxer messages!  At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, China engaged in the spreading of propaganda claiming that the COVID-19 virus came from the United States. Then, in order to increase their influence in other countries, China supplied the COVID-19 vaccine they developed and other things to the Philippines and nations in central Asia and the Middle East that still did not have access to the vaccines made in the United States (a move known as “vaccine diplomacy”). To retaliate for this and counter Chinese influence, the Trump administration authorized a clandestine psychological operation to be carried out by the military in which, using hundreds of fake social media accounts that ended up accumulating altogether tens of thousands of followers, they fanned antivaxxer sentiment in those countries and spread misinformation about the Chinese vaccine. The accounts posted suggestive things such as that the virus came from China and the vaccine too, that the vaccine from China was fake, that it might be a rat killer, and that it contained pork gelatin (this was targeted to Muslim countries). This was at the time that tens of thousands of people were dying each day as a result of COVID-19. After the Biden administration came into power, this particular disinformation program was shut down. The above is not an unfounded conspiracy. We know it is true because the news organization Reuters which broke the story conducted interviews with contractors working for the US army, retired and active US officials, academic researchers and social media analysts, and reviewed data regarding fake social media accounts used by the U.S. military. I have been actively countering antivaxxers and promoting vaccines for years, so I am appalled that our own government participated in spreading these messages. Now, let me make it clear that I am not ignorant about the cutthroat environment of international politics. China is a dictatorship where there is no freedom of the press. People in China who try to investigate any alleged foreign psychological operations carried out by Chinese military operatives will end up in jail. The reason why Reuters was able to discover what the U.S. military was doing, and the reason we learned about it, is because of the freedoms we enjoy in this country. I could not have written this post if it were not for those freedoms. Therefore, I understand that the United States has to fight against governments such as the Chinese in several fronts, including the psychological realm, to counter its influence. However, I don’t think the way to do it is to spread antivaxxer messages or misinformation about a vaccine. And in thinking like this I am not alone. Top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia strongly objected to the anti-vax campaign, but they were overruled. Reuters quotes one American military official saying, “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective. We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.” In the end, China’s vaccine diplomacy was not as successful as they expected, although probably not due to the psychological operation carried out by the U.S. government, but rather due to hard power tactics that China employed in many countries where they came across as an aggressor. Whether the U.S. caused damage due to its antivaxxer campaign is difficult to discern. The evidence we have indicates that the Chinese vaccine worked reasonably well against the initial variants of the COVID-19 virus. In places where only the Chinese vaccine was available, it saved lives. Therefore, anyone foregoing receiving the Chinese vaccine could have placed themselves in danger. I am not a military operative specialized in conducting psychological operations. But I would venture that any way of countering the influence of China or other countries or organizations has to take into account the well-being of foreign nationals. Instead of conducting this antivaxxer campaign, the US government could have, for example, been more proactive in sharing the COVID-19 vaccines developed in the United States with other countries from the beginning to build up goodwill towards the United States. That’s just my two cents. The unmodified image by Christian Emmer is used under an Attribution Noncomercial 4.0 international Deed (CC BY-NC 4.0).
0 Comments
In a hearing about the coronavirus pandemic, congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene hounded (no pun intended) Dr. Fauci about experiments conducted with beagles which were approved by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during his tenure as its director. She called these experiments disgusting and evil, stated that Americans don’t pay their taxes for animals to be tortured like this, and she refused to call Dr. Fauci a doctor. This hearing was about the coronavirus pandemic, so at one-point Fauci asked puzzled, “What do dogs have to do with anything we are talking about today?”. To be fair, some of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s other questions did address matters related to the coronavirus issue, although she did not give Fauci a chance to answer them, at one point even saying “Nah, I don’t need your answer”. Nevertheless, what I want to address in this post is the issue of the beagle experiments (which has been termed “Beaglegate”) because it often receives a superficial treatment every time it is brought up.  The experiments in question involved beagle dogs which were anesthetized and then placed in contact with sand flies carrying a protozoan parasite called leishmania. There are about 700 thousand to one million cases of leishmania infection worldwide each year, and in many countries where this happens, dogs are the main animal reservoir for the parasite in urban areas. How severe a leishmania infection is depends on the strain of the parasite. The most common variety of the parasite will produce a cutaneous form of the disease, which will just produce scarring at the site of infection. However, more pathogenic varieties of the parasite can produce visceral leishmaniasis, which can be lethal if left untreated in 90% of the cases among children under 5 years of age, adults over 50 years of age, or people with comorbidities or compromised immune systems. While leishmaniasis is a disease associated with developing countries, it has already made its way to Texas. Therefore, this disease if of interest to scientists and medical doctors from a public health perspective, and because dogs are often involved in the transmission of the parasite in urban environments, they have been used extensively as experimental models to study the disease (for example click on these links: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5). So yes, dogs are used in experiments where they have to be infected with the parasite by various means, and yes, the dogs will face a certain amount of discomfort and pain, and yes, they will be euthanized at the end to obtain biological samples and to evaluate the changes the disease produces to their bodies. My question then is: what is the problem? Here many people get emotional. They would say, “The poor dogs were being “eaten” by sandflies in these experiments! This is torture! This is cruel! This is immoral! This is…etc.”. These, of course, are value judgements. As a society, we have to decide what our values are with respect to issues involving dogs. For example, in some countries it is legal to breed dogs commercially to eat them, but in the United States the Dog and Cat Meat Trade Prohibition Law of 2018 ended commercial dog meat businesses. So, if people want to ban experimentation with dogs, they should petition their elected representatives. However, as of now, it is perfectly legal to conduct experiments with dogs. Between 2007 and 2019, more than 8,000 publications in scientific journals have involved dogs, and of these, more than 5,000 have involved beagles. Experimentation with dogs has led to many discoveries and medical treatments. Dogs were employed in the experiments that led to the discovery of insulin. Research on dogs in the field of cardiology led to the first electrical defibrillator. Dogs were also used in the development of artificial heart valves. Because dogs can be bred to develop muscular dystrophy like humans, they have been used for researching this condition leading to a better genetic tests and treatments. Dogs were used in the first demonstration that cigarette smoke causes cancer, and to show that second hand smoke causes cancer too. A lot of what we know about the effects of radiation on health comes from experiments with dogs. Many new drugs are also tested on dogs before beginning clinical trials with humans. And research on dogs has also benefited dogs. Vaccines against rabies, parvovirus, and canine hepatitis were developed using dogs in the research. Research on dogs has also led to canine improved nutritional guidelines and medicines to treat dogs. Insofar as science is concerned, scientists working with dogs and other animals as experimental subjects are required to follow guidelines to ensure good animal welfare both by the institutions where they work and by the institutions which provide their funding. If they don’t, they should be sanctioned, but nobody is arguing that the experimental guidelines were not followed in the Beaglegate experiments. As to Dr. Fauci, he did not specifically and individually approve the grants for the beagle experiments. The grant review process first involves a review by a group called the Scientific Review Group made up primarily of non-federal scientists with expertise in the relevant areas of research. The grants are then reviewed by another group called the Advisory Council, which is made up of scientific and public representatives chosen for their expertise, interest, and activity in areas of public health. The only grant applications funded are those recommended by both groups. At the end of this process, Dr. Fauci, as director of the institute, formally approved bundles of thousands of grants at a time, which he did not read or review on an individual basis. My opinion on this whole matter is that the outrage over “Beaglegate” is just another way that Fauci haters have tried to slander him. Dr. Fauci has saved or improved the lives of tens of millions of people with his research and his public service. After not being able to tarnish his impeccable reputation, they have resorted to exploiting the fondness of people for cute animals to smear Dr. Fauci over perfectly legal experiments that are critical for public health. The image, designed by Wannapik, is used under a non-commercial license. |
Categories
All
Archives
October 2024
|
RSS Feed