Gates-Funded Gavi Takes Aim at Memes, Calls Them ‘Disinformation Super-Spreaders’

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, founded and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, reposted…

Children's Health Defense

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance took aim at “disinformation super-spreaders” in the “anti-vaccine movement” in an article it reposted Feb. 13.

“Memes have featured in anti-vaccine messaging for centuries and their power to spread harmful health disinformation is growing,” according to the article’s blurb.

The article warned that while memes are often associated with “cute cats and celebrities with funny captions,” they have “a more sinister function” as “part of a highly sophisticated strategy to spread and monetise health disinformation.”

Citing the “long history” of anti-vaccination memes, the article featured an image from 1802 depicting a vaccine monster being fed a basket of infants and “excreting them with horns,” and another from 1892 showing a vaccination serpent and a dancing skeleton threatening a mother and infant.

However, “The most infamous anti-vaccination meme,” the article stated, “emerged from a now discredited 1998 study that falsely linked the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism.”

The article linked to a 2010 Canadian Medical Association Journal piece about The Lancet’s retraction of Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s paper and to a 2011 BMJ editorial calling Wakefield’s study fraudulent.

Wakefield’s study, the article claimed, resulted in the meme “vaccines cause autism” appearing on billboards and circulating “widely in the media.”

Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav analyzed the Wakefield controversy in a multi-part article, noting that the U.K. High Court later found “no evidence whatsoever to support the charge of professional misconduct, much less the accusation of fraud.”

Quoting the Media Manipulation Casebook, the article defined “meme war” as the propagation of memes for “political persuasion or community building, or to strategically spread narratives and other messaging crucial to a media manipulation campaign.”

The authors identified “three recurring themes” in the memes encouraging vaccine refusal:

The government and social institutions are corrupt, politically compromised and tyrannical and are using unsafe and ineffective vaccines for surveillance, control and profit.
Unvaccinated people are unfairly stigmatized and persecuted, “subject to Nazi-like sanctions and social exclusion.”
The vaccinated are morally and physically inferior to the unvaccinated, for example, they suffer from reduced fertility and critical thinking ability.

But the most “sinister” element of the meme campaigns, according to the article, was to “profit financially from pandemic anxieties,” including promoting “potentially harmful” and “unapproved” health treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

The authors did not explain how a person could make a living from selling inexpensive unpatented medicines, nor did they compare this claim to the profits made by companies peddling remdesivir or COVID-19 vaccines…