https://archive.ph/Kd49k https:// www. nytimes. com/2021/08/05/us/politics/covid-vaccines-russian-disinformation. html

Russian Disinformation Targets Vaccines and the Biden Administration

A new campaign appears to be spreading falsehoods about the potential for forced inoculations against Covid-19.

By Julian E. Barnes Aug. 5, 2021Updated 4:08 p.m. ET

The cartoon posted on the far-right discussion forum showed police officers wearing Biden-Harris campaign logos on bulletproof vests and battering down a door with a large syringe. A caption read in part, “In Biden’s America.”

The cartoon appears to be an example of the latest effort in Russian-aligned disinformation: a campaign that taps into skepticism and fears of coronavirus vaccination to not just undermine the effort to immunize people but also try to falsely link the Biden-Harris administration to the idea of forced inoculations. The image was one of several spotted by Graphika, a company tracking disinformation campaigns.

Their use of far-right message boards, including Patriots.win, was earlier reported by Graphika and Reuters.

Much of the disinformation efforts are posted on websites with little to no moderation. Patriots.win, which bills itself as a forum supportive of Donald J. Trump, began on Reddit before it was kicked off. From Patriots.win, some of the material attributed to foreign disinformation campaigns have migrated to larger sites with right-wing audiences like Gab and Parler.

The moderators of Patriots.win responded to a request for comment with an anti-gay slur and suggested, perhaps facetiously, that Chinese organizations were posting material but routing it through Russia to fool journalists.

https://archive.ph/V7xg5 https:// apnews. com/article/lifestyle-joe-biden-business-health-travel-d2b00a2fddc5af7b8e23afbfd2961b02

13 Aug 2021 13:19:34 UTC

Biden eyes tougher vaccine rules without provoking backlash

By ZEKE MILLER yesterday

In just the past two weeks, Biden has forced millions of federal workers to attest to their vaccination status or face onerous new requirements. He’s met with business leaders at the White House to press them to do the same.

But even as Biden becomes more aggressive, he has refrained from using all his powers to pressure Americans to get vaccinated. He’s held off, for instance, on proposals to require vaccinations for all air travelers or, for that matter, the federal workforce. The result is a precarious balancing act as Biden works to make life more uncomfortable for the unvaccinated without spurring a backlash in a deeply polarized country that would only undermine his public health goals.

For now, Biden has required most federal workers to attest to their vaccination status under potential criminal penalties, with those who have not received a dose required to maintain social distancing, test weekly for the virus and face other potential restrictions on their work.

Health workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Health and Human Services will be required to get vaccinated, and the Pentagon has announced that it intends to mandate vaccines for the military by next month.

Zients said the White House still has no plans to develop the infrastructure for so-called vaccine passports, despite some criticism from businesses that the patchwork of local and state verification systems leaves them without a clear way to enforce mandates. The Biden administration had promised to share frameworks for verification systems, but ultimately left them all to the private sector and local governments, in part because of political sensitivities.

Still, while more severe measures — such as mandating vaccines for interstate travel or changing how the federal government reimburses treatment for those who are unvaccinated and become ill with COVID-19 — have been discussed, the administration worried that they would be too polarizing for the moment.

That’s not to say they won’t be implemented in the future, as public opinion continues to shift toward requiring vaccinations as a means to restore normalcy.

Lawrence Gostin, a professor of health law at Georgetown University, said Biden would likely need to continue to turn up the pressure on the unvaccinated. “He’s really going to have to use all the leverage the federal government has, and indeed use pressure points,” Gostin said. “And I think there are a few that he can do but he hasn’t done yet.”