No Alcohol for 2 Months, Russia Tells Coronavirus Vaccine Recipients

Recipients of Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine should abstain from alcohol for nearly two months before and after immunization, the head of Russia’s consumer safety watchdog said Tuesday.

Rospotrebnadzor head Anna Popova’s instructions follow Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova’s recommendations to avoid alcohol and immunosuppressants for 42 days because the two-shot vaccine is administered with a 21-day gap between doses.

“The intake of alcohol needs to stop at least two weeks prior to immunization,” Popova said in an interview with Radio Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Recipients should then abstain from alcohol for “42 days after the first injection,” Popova added. “Immunity is being formed and one needs to take care.”

“It’s a strain on the body. If we want to stay healthy and have a strong immune response, don’t drink alcohol,” she pleaded with Russians, who are among the world’s highest alcohol consumers despite seeing a significant decline in consumption since 2003.

Popova also advised against smoking before and after vaccination because tobacco smoke irritates the lung and skews immune responses.

Following Popova’s comments, Alexander Gintsburg, the head of the state-run Gamaleya research center that developed Sputnik V, said that while one shouldn’t abuse alcohol before or after vaccination, “a single glass of champagne never hurt anyone.”

Russia’s Covid-19 vaccination drive for high-risk volunteers began in Moscow this weekend despite Sputnik V still undergoing post-registration clinical trials for safety. Its developers say the adenovirus-based vaccine is 95% effective against the virus.

Health officials estimate that 100,000 Russians have received Sputnik V, including trial participants and members of the military.

Russia has the world’s fourth-highest Covid-19 caseload of over 2.5 million and the 10th-highest fatality count with 44,000 deaths.

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Bill Gates does not have a secret plan to tag you

Staff at a US-based non-profit have received death threats linked to erroneous claims about its work on digital ID in a case propelled by the tide of misinformation over coronavirus and false accusations against Bill Gates.

Dakota Gruener, CEO of New York-based non-profit ID2020, told The New Humanitarian the threats were linked to “patently false” online conspiracy theories about COVID-19, and described the episode as “pretty frightening”.

The head of the World Health Organisation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has warned that false and fringe ideas can undermine international efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic and sow panic, confusion, and division. 

Research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that the largest category of COVID-19 misinformation involves “public authorities, including government and international bodies”. Social media platforms have made commitments to remove the worst misinformation and provide free placement to the WHO and other official sources. A recent addition to WHO’s series of “mythbusters”, for example, debunks false claims about 5G.

In a matter of weeks, ID2020 has gone from niche international policy operator, to the subject of thousands of hostile media postings, to having to call in the FBI.

The results of being caught up in COVID-19 conspiracy theories, meanwhile, can be dramatic. 

In a matter of weeks, ID2020 – which advocates for digital ID for the billion undocumented people worldwide and under-served groups like refugees – has gone from niche international policy operator, to the subject of thousands of hostile media postings, to having to call in the FBI. Here’s how.

The case of ID2020

A public-private coalition – members include representatives from Microsoft and Accenture as well as NGOs, academia, blockchain firms, and others – ID2020 is advising the government of Bangladesh on a vaccination records system.

The non-profit, which does not work on embedded microchips, is falsely accused of being part of fictitious plans that allege Bill Gates supports mandatory vaccination and the implantation of microchips or “quantum dot tattoos” into patients.

The claims about Gates have been debunked by fact-checkers at Reuters, but ID2020 is not listed in the leading database of COVID-19 debunks.

(Disclosure: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one of several funders of The New Humanitarian.)*

TNH

A COVID-19 misinformation example.

Since mid-March, the outfit, which had an income of $1.4 million in the 2017 tax year, has been mentioned alongside false claims about Gates and COVID-19 in tens of thousands of social media postings, videos, and memes, amplified to millions after being shared by members of impassioned communities.

The ID2020 theory attracts attention, for example, from adherents of the QAnon conspiracy, the “alt-right”, objectors to 5G telecommunications, and Christians considering apocalyptic prophecies such as the “mark of the beast”. 

Asked by TNH about the Gates and ID2020 conspiracy, Tedros praised the “extraordinary commitment” and sincerity of Bill and Melinda Gates and thanked them for their contribution. 

A ‘wild ride’ starts with prolific conspiracy theorist Alex Jones

In a telephone interview with TNH, Gruener, the ID2020 CEO, said it had been a “wild ride” and she was “mystified”, adding: “I don’t know who’s behind this.” Gruener could, however, trace the beginnings of the firestorm back to October 2019. 

A 23 October monologue by Alex Jones on the InfoWars website falsely alleged that an ID2020-linked pilot project was implanting “chips” into homeless people in Texas – he refers to an article that appears to misinterpret the word “biometric”.

Jones is banned from several social media platforms for his misleading claims and is “almost certainly the most prolific conspiracy theorist in contemporary America”, according to the US watchdog the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

The Jones monologue referred to a September press release in which ID2020 announced its largest ever venture – alongside the vaccine alliance Gavi – advising the Bangladesh government on its immunisation records. The statement also mentioned the Texas pilot project. In Bangladesh, it announced that the government would create a database of children’s immunisations linked to their parents’ biometric information – most likely a digital fingerprint. 

The implementation of ID and biometrics in developing countries can attract real controversies, and the initiative may yet run into criticism for things it really does mean to do: ID2020 also plans trials of biometric recordkeeping of children, including babies. 

As reported by TNH last year, the technology for infant biometrics is not fully mature, and raises practical and ethical questions.

How ID2020 got sucked into COVID-19 conspiracy theories

According to Gruener, the flurry of chatter started by Jones – who has long promoted rumours of plans to microchip the public – died down in October but re-surfaced recently in much greater strength amidst the flood of COVID-19 misinformation. 

An 18 March Q&A by Gates on the website Reddit provided fuel for the conspiracists: he said digital certificates could be used to prove future COVID-19 vaccination status. This was linked, without evidence, by commentators to the possibility of implants and a range of much wilder hypotheses.

Gruener said ID2020 would not consider chips or “implantables” because they could be used without the user’s consent. For the same reason, it does not support facial recognition, she said. Gruener insisted that ID2020’s vision is “the opposite” of “deeply frightening… Orwellian” large-scale surveillance systems. ID2020, she said, is trying to put the individual in charge of their data, and allow them to use digital certificates as credentials, for example for driving or for professional qualifications or vaccination records.

Online searches for ID2020 spiked in March, according to Google Trends, showing that the name had started to percolate. A YouTube video describing the made-up plans as Satanic and posted on 21 March has racked up 1.8 million views. 

News articles about ID2020, almost all negative, also picked up, according to monitors GDELT and Media Cloud. Multiple petitions have also been mounted against ID2020, including one – which repeats false accusations – on the White House website. Others, but not all, have been removed by petition website operator Change.org. YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook all carry significant amounts of videos, memes, and false allegations against Gates and ID2020.

According to the Reuters Institute study, Facebook and YouTube had taken down about three quarters of the misinformation found to be false by fact-checkers in its sample. Twitter had only removed 31 percent.

TNH analysed a sample of 58,000 tweets and retweets mentioning ID2020 between 31 March and 12 April and found at least 50 percent mentioned Gates (he has no direct relationship with ID2020 although Microsoft – the tech giant he co-founded is a member) or other conspiracies. A single tweet by one alt-right reporter was retweeted by people with a collective following of nine million. Hundreds of negative or politicising hashtags were used, ranging from #5G and #plandemic to #markofthebeast. About half the postings with hashtags used a negative hashtag. 

Is there anything to it?

The accusations against ID2020 are clearly false but, as with much misinformation, grains of truth in the conspiracy theory are being spun into the bigger lie. A couple of examples:

A recent experimental study, seized upon by the conspiracists, describes a skin patch used on rats that delivered a vaccine and a “quantum dot” at the same time. The tiny tattoo only becomes visible under a near-infrared light. The authors suggest the technology could be useful “in the developing world” for “intradermal on-person vaccination recordkeeping”. The experiment was partially funded by the Gates Foundation. Its abstract has been viewed tens of thousands of times on a science journal’s website. 

Some of the “alt-right” commentary focuses on a “UN plan”: that may refer to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which include a target to “provide legal identity to all, including birth registration, by 2030”. It makes no mention of digital or biometric technology.

Gruener told TNH she saw ID2020 as collateral damage for conspiracy theorists: “We are part of a bigger vortex.”

Graphic shown in header image is an undirected network graph of co-occurring hashtags in tweets about ID2020.

* Added 16 April 2020 for full disclosure. About TNH.

bp/ag

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LIVE UPDATES: CDC urges mask use while indoors

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) urged Americans to wear face masks indoors while outside of the home amid a surge in coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths. The guidance comes as the agency’s director approved a plan put forth by an advisory committee for vaccine distribution, that will see the initial limited supply first go to health care workers and long-term care facility residents. 

The vaccine distribution now hinges on the FDA’s verdict regarding Pfizer and BioNTech’s candidate. The regulatory agency is set to meet on Dec. 10 to discuss Pfizer’s application for EUA. A second meeting is planned a week later to discuss Moderna’s status. 

Ahead of the expected approval, states have been planning and discussing distribution plans of their own. 

• The U.S. has tallied more than 13.8 million cases since the pandemic began
• FDA set to meet Dec. 10 to discuss Pfizer’s EUA application 
• CDC urges mask use while indoors

The planning and preparations come as infectious disease experts warn that a dark winter is ahead for Americans, with Dr. Anthony Fauci cautioning that the nation should brace for a surge over the next two to three weeks due to holiday travel and gatherings. 

Follow below for updates on the coronavirus pandemic. Mobile users click here. 

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Former cybersecurity chief says Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are trying to steal coronavirus vaccine IP

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Under Secretary Chris Krebs speaks to reporters at the DHS Election Operations Center and National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) in Arlington, Virginia, U.S. November 6, 2018.

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

WASHINGTON — The former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Sunday that adversaries have attempted to steal intellectual property related to the coronavirus vaccine.

“The big four, Russia, China, Iran and North Korea we have seen to some extent all four of those countries doing some kind of espionage or spying, trying to get intellectual property related to the vaccine,” Chris Krebs, former CISA Director said on CBS “Face the Nation.”

“What we had been thinking through at CISA was not just the vaccine developers but their entire supply chain and really trying to look for those critical weak spots,” Krebs said.

“So it’s not just about Moderna and some of the others that are developing the vaccine — it’s their supply chains, its the distribution channels and public health institutions,” he said. “Those are the folks that we have to continue to spread cybersecurity support to from the national security community and from the private sector.”

IBM released a report last week which found a global phishing campaign targeting the Covid-19 cold chain, a part of the supply chain that preserves vaccines a low temperatures during storage and transit. CISA encouraged organizations associated with Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. vaccine program, to review the IBM report for any indicators they may have been compromised.

Krebs, the former head of the CISA, was responsible for leading the effort to protect U.S. elections. He was fired by President Donald Trump in a pair of tweets last month.

Trump said that Krebs gave a “highly inaccurate” statement about the security of the 2020 presidential election.

Trump, who has not yet conceded to president-elect Joe Biden, alleged that the election was riddled with “massive improprieties and fraud.” Twitter labeled the president’s tweets with a warning the claim about election fraud is disputed.

Krebs had previously said that there is no evidence the elections were compromised by foreign interference.

“It is time for leaders in the national security community, in the Republican party to stand up, accept the results and move forward,” said Krebs, a life long Republican.

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He got a coronavirus vaccine in China but had to keep it secret. Why?

The oil company worker wondered why he had to keep his vaccination a secret. Questions raced through his head as he read the confidentiality agreement, which threatened discipline if he told anyone outside company management about the COVID-19 shot he was waiting to get.

What if something went wrong? Who would take responsibility? The worker knew the vaccine maker, China National Biotec Group — part of the state-owned pharmaceutical group Sinopharm — was conducting trials of this vaccine on hundreds of thousands of volunteers in the United Arab Emirates, Peru, Morocco and other countries.

“At least they’re in a monitored, controlled situation,” he said of those trials, watching as hundreds of his co-workers lined up around him to get their injection at a clinic in Beijing. “But for us, they can’t make any guarantees. This is us making a sacrifice for the nation.”

The employee — who did not give his name for fear of reprisal — is one of hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens who have received COVID-19 vaccines before they have been proved safe in clinical trials. China’s military began getting vaccinations in June. Medical workers and employees of state-owned companies working abroad were soon included in an “emergency use” program. In September, a China National Biotec executive said 350,000 people outside clinical trials had already received the vaccine.

Early vaccinations of high-profile people have become a way to show trust in China’s medical system after a 2018 scandal in which children were exposed to faulty vaccines for diphtheria and tetanus.

In March, images of Chen Wei, a military general and epidemiologist leading one of the coronavirus vaccine efforts, were widely shared by social media users, praising her for receiving an injection before it had been tested on animals. Yin Weidong, chief executive of biopharmaceutical company Sinovac, told reporters last month that he was one of the first to take the vaccine after it passed the first two trial phases. About 90% of Sinovac’s employees have voluntarily taken the vaccine early, the company said.

This month, China National Biotec Group reportedly began offering free vaccines to Chinese students planning to go abroad, according to a company website that was later taken down. More than 93,000 people had signed up for the free vaccine, the website said. Students who had been vaccinated also spoke to local and foreign media about their experiences. But state media later reported that the free vaccine offer was “not real.”

Several cities in Zhejiang province have also reportedly begun offering vaccines made by Sinovac. In Yiwu city, Chinese media found a clinic offering vaccination shots for about $30 each on a “first come, first served” basis. Most of those receiving shots were people planning international travel, though they did not have to prove it, according to local reports.

A technician works in a lab at Sinovac Biotech in Beijing on Sept. 24, 2020. The lab is working on a potential coronavirus vaccine.

(Kevin Frayer / Getty Images)

None of the vaccines have completed Phase 3 trials, which often catch rare side effects that go undetected in earlier phases.

Chinese health authorities have said that the vaccines are safe, with no severe adverse effects, and that their “emergency use” is justified to protect against imported infections or a domestic resurgence of COVID-19. But health experts outside China are questioning the safety and ethics of such a strategy, especially when China has largely contained the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s a huge gamble, because you’re giving the vaccine to people who are healthy,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.

Such a risk might make sense in a country where the virus was rapidly spreading and front-line workers were constantly exposed to COVID-19 — as in the United States — but Western health experts and vaccine makers have been wary of prematurely rolling out a vaccine.

“I would not expect a country with a highly developed regulatory and safety system like the United States, the European Union [states] or Japan to allow that kind of wide access to an unproven vaccine,” Gostin said. “It’s unethical, and it’s dangerous.”

The oil company worker, who is usually based in a Persian Gulf country but has been stuck in Beijing since January, sent copies to The Times of the consent forms and confidentiality agreement he had to sign before receiving the vaccine. He also provided screenshots of WeChat discussions about vaccinations among his colleagues.

The worker said he received the vaccine in September as a requirement for all staff working abroad. He worried about the lack of transparency or scrutiny in China’s mass vaccination of state-owned company employees and other citizens. There was no written document forcing them to receive the vaccine, he said, but workers were not being cleared to return to their jobs abroad unless they were vaccinated.

“Are you afraid of the vaccine? Of course. But are you afraid of getting the sickness? Yes, you’re always afraid,” the oil company worker said.

It was “politically incorrect” to question the vaccine at his company, he said. Most of his colleagues were eager to get it. They were more afraid of catching COVID-19 abroad than of safety concerns with the vaccine.

Workers package rabies vaccine at a lab at the Yisheng Biopharma company, where researchers are trying to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus, in Shenyang, China, on June 9, 2020. China has mobilised its army and fast-tracked tests in the global race to find a coronavirus vaccine, and is involved in several of the dozen or so international clinical trials currently underway.

(Noel Celis / AFP/Getty Images)

Some project managers were rushing the vaccinations, he said, by encouraging employees to receive two shots at once instead of waiting the recommended 14 or 28 days between injections.

“I saw that some people got two shots together.… But you have to say you’re urgently departing the country,” a colleague who appeared to be coordinating staff vaccinations wrote in one of the WeChat screenshots. “I’m thinking the three of you can save a trip and get back to the project earlier.… Ask them if you can get both shots at once,” the colleague said.

A consent form shared by the employee appears to verify this account: “If you urgently need to go abroad and truly cannot complete the two-shot vaccination, you can consider receiving two injections at once, one each on the left and the right,” the form says.

Although severe adverse effects had not been observed in this vaccine, the form warns of possible fever, fatigue, diarrhea and headaches. Other vaccines on the market sometimes caused severe reactions such as anaphylactic shock. If that happened to a vaccination subject, the person should “seek timely treatment,” the form says.

Vaccine doses are usually spaced out so that the first “priming” dose sensitizes a body’s immune system to recognize a new pathogen, while the second “booster” dose stimulates higher antibody levels, said Keiji Fukuda, director of the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health and a former World Health Organization official.

Giving two doses on the same day is an attempt to drive antibody levels higher by giving more vaccine, he said: “The prime-boost approach takes advantage of how the immune system works naturally. The large dose approach is more like applying brute force.”

Premature vaccine use can also create a false sense of safety, said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. China calls its emergency use vaccines effective because they produce antibodies, he said: “But that is a low threshold.”

Syringes of the potential vaccine CoronaVac are seen at Sinovac Biotech.

(Kevin Frayer / Getty Images)

More testing is needed to show how effective the antibodies are, how long they last, and whether they can protect against different strains of the coronavirus — questions that cannot be answered in China,where the lack of an active outbreak makes it hard to prove whether a vaccine is working.

A representative of the oil company said over the phone that he “could not disclose any information” regarding vaccinations. Sinopharm did not pick up phone calls or respond to faxed requests for comment.

A Times reporter visited the site where the oil company worker was vaccinated, a clinic near Beijing’s Olympic Park, in late September. Medical staff there confirmed that they were giving out coronavirus vaccines, but only to employees of designated state-owned enterprises, and said all their appointment slots for the coming month had been filled.

Sinovac, the company whose vaccines are reportedly being distributed in Zhejiang, did not pick up phone calls or respond to emailed requests for comment.

The opacity of China’s vaccine experiments has sparked backlash. Papua New Guinea complained in August when China sent mine workers who’d received vaccines to the South Pacific country without fully disclosing whether they were part of a trial or the risks involved in receiving vaccinated workers.

But many countries are also clamoring for China’s coronavirus vaccines, which Chinese President Xi Jinping has pledged to make a “global public good.” Brazil’s health regulator approved the import of 6 million vaccines from Sinovac this week. The United Arab Emirates approved its own emergency use of a Sinopharm vaccine in September. Sinovac has agreed to supply 40 million doses of its vaccine to Indonesia by March.

China announced this month that it was joining COVAX, a global initiative to ensure equitable distribution of vaccines to developing countries. Sinopharm also announced this month that it was preparing production lines in Beijing and Wuhan to make 1 billion doses of its vaccines next year.

Such moves have bolstered China’s soft power regardless of questions about vaccine transparency, especially in comparison with the United States, which has struggled to contain its COVID-19 outbreak, withdrawn from the WHO and refused to participate in COVAX.

“We cannot claim that moral high ground when we accuse China of using the vaccine to achieve their foreign policy goals. No matter what they are doing, at least they benefit people in the developing world,” Huang said. “We like to talk about China exercising vaccine diplomacy, but the U.S. is not even part of the game.”

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