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Continued for the link averse....Dmitriev christened the AstraZeneca product “the monkey vaccine” because it uses a chimpanzee virus as its delivery mechanism. Last October, memes, videos and pictures of King Kong injecting a screaming woman and Boris Johnson as part of the cast of Planet of the Apes were posted from anonymous online accounts and went viral.
A report by the EU watchdog, the external action service, found that between December and April, the disinformation intensified. “Russia and China, in particular, continue to intensively promote their own state-produced vaccines around the world.”
It accused them of pursuing “a zero-sum game logic” designed to undermine trust in western-made vaccines, EU institutions and western vaccination strategies.
AstraZeneca was not the only target, but the catalogue of disasters provided Russian interests and their proxies with new opportunities to promote Sputnik V – and stoke social divisions. There are suggestions that Kremlin interests hoped to sow dissension across Europe, destabilising Germany and France in particular. Certainly, those behind Sputnik and RT, the Russian state television channel, have amplified the anti-vaccine and anti-mask voices in Europe and the US, gaining particular traction in France.
For the scientists at Oxford and AstraZeneca, seeking to make sense of all the troubles that have afflicted them, it feels personal.
Most critics and defenders of the vaccine agree on one thing: the developers, manufacturers and for that matter the British government should have come out fighting. Thinking they were saving the world, it didn’t occur to Oxford or AstraZeneca that they needed to be proactive.
They also agree that the world – particularly the developing world – needs this vaccine.
Dr Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development, cited three issues that had gone badly wrong. “AstraZeneca is not a vaccine company. That’s probably one. Two, they’re trying to accelerate this in a public health emergency. Three, there is this rare complication, the cerebral thrombosis, happening in an environment of intense anti-vaccine aggression. And you’ve now got reports from the Russian government trying to discredit their competitors’ Covid vaccines.
“It’s been a perfect storm … They’ve got to figure out a way to communicate this to walk it back so we can get this fixed.”
