The United States has identified a Russian-led disinformation campaign seeking to undermine confidence in the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, an official with the State Department's Global Engagement Center told The Wall Street Journal.
The official said four websites that U.S. intelligence has marked as fronts for Russian intelligence have exaggerated the risk of side effects associated with the Pfizer shot and other Western vaccines and falsely questioned their efficacy and speed of their approval process. The sites don't have large readership numbers, but officials are reportedly concerned they could be amplified.
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A spokesman for the Kremlin denied that Moscow was orchestrating a campaign against any vaccine, arguing that if Russia were to treat "every negative publication" about the Sputnik jab "as a result of efforts by American special services, then we will go crazy because we see it every day, every hour, and in every Anglo-Saxon media." Read more at The Wall Street Journal.
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