Russian Covid Vaccine in Latin America: Disinformation or Aggressive Marketing?

 

The Russians have been aggressive in their promotional tactics for their new Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine. On February 5, 2021, the NY Times reported “Russian Vaccine Promotions Undercut U.S.-Made Shots” (see: http://nyti.ms/3cSg6sBm, which is also a photo source).

 

According to the Times, the Russians are harnessing Spanish-language social media and the official Twitter account of the Russian Embassy in Mexico City to mount a campaign targeting Latin America. It must be working because Mexico “which this week signed a deal to acquire millions of doses of the Russian vaccine, and Argentina, which last month began vaccinating its citizens with it.”

 

It’s no secret that market leaders Pfizer, Oxford-Astra Zeneca, Moderna and newcomer Johnson & Johnson are in for the money. Big Pharma is not a nonprofit do-gooder organization and are much more likely to focus on markets that can afford to pay the best prices for their vaccines. You can learn more from this CNN article at: http://cnn.it/3q5pRHF.

 

 

Is it illegal to tout your product? There is a legal expression called “seller’s puff”. According to Cornell Law School this is “The practice of exaggerating the value of a product, a business, or property for promotional purposes. Sellers are not generally held liable for exaggerations that are considered puffing. But they can be liable for misrepresenting the facts of a product.”

 

The Times quotes Bret Schafer from Alliance for Security Democracy (hyperlinked for your convenience),  which describes itself as “a nonpartisan initiative housed at the German Marshall Fund of the United States” as saying “Almost everything they are promoting about the vaccine is manipulated and put out without context,” and “Every negative story or issue that has come out about a U.S.-made vaccine is amplified, while they flood the zone with any positive report about the Russian vaccine.”

 

Another of their sources, Jamie Longoria of First Draft (hyperlinked for your convenience and a photo source) who concluded ““Russia steadily seeded a narrative that has grown and been, to some degree, accepted.” Longoria continued “They have cultivated a large audience and regularly rank in the top 10 of the most-shared stories or links,” “The new approach was particularly effective because the Spanish-language Twitter and Facebook accounts of Russia Today and Sputnik, because two state-controlled media outlets, regularly rank among the most influential in Latin America”

 

 

If we take these two sources comments and analyze them, are they very much different than many of the advertising claims we hear every day?

 

So - what takes their efforts over the line?

 

The campaign also goes out of its way to promote false claims about the dangers of US vaccines while touting their own and quoting other sources such as a Chinese report that falsely claimed, “that falsely claimed the U.S. media had remained silent on deaths related to Pfizer’s vaccine.”

 

One of my favorite allegations, as reported in the Times of London (see: http://bit.ly/3aKq2BF, which is also a photo source) “is that the Astrazenca vaccine could turn people into monkeys because it uses a chimpanzee virus as a vector”

 

The Chinese are not to be outdone in the influence world. On January 29, 2021 the NY Times published a major article “Inside a pro-Huawei Influence Campaign” about “a covert online push to sway telecommunications policy in favor of the Chinese company”. (see: http://nyti.ms/2YZZqr3)

 

Our adversaries are clearly upping their game – are we?