Russian Trolls Spreading Measles In Europe

When I suggested that in 2-3 more decades Russia will become responsible for the Holocaust, with attendant criminal penalties for its denial in many Western countries, it was said three quarters in jest. But perhaps it should have been fully half serious.

But more to the point, I recently came across this infographic of Ukraine’s measles vaccination rate over the years:

What do we see?

  • Plummeting immunization rates during the late Orange regime.
  • Modest recovery under Yanukovych’s regime.
  • Another collapse under the Maidan regime, albeit with a partial recovery at the end.

In other words, all of its declines in immunization rates happened precisely when Ukraine was deepest under American influence. Which makes sense, the US being the historic heartland of the anti-vax movement, which presumably makes inroads whenever fundamentalist West Ukrainian country bumpkins come to power.

At least this seems like a more plausible explanation that the current narrative in which Russian trolls are trotted out just as Europe, led by the Ukraine, experience a surge in measles outbreaks – which in the Ukraine’s case clearly stems from the collapse in immunization rates precisely during the time when the West’s people were in power there.

Fortunately, there is RFERL to let everyone know that RUSSIAN TROLLS ARE SPREADING ANTI-VAX DEZINFORMATSIYA AND KILLING YOUR CHILDREN.

Comments

  1. In Hungary a fifty-something woman, a former middle school teacher (not your typical demographic of an internet entrepreneur), was (and I think still is) running half a dozen websites spreading lots of stupid clickbait content, including anti-vaxer stuff. Most of her Facebook pages were shut down (but she restarted each of them under slightly modified names), but her websites were not, and though some lawyers were arguing that she could easily be convicted for medical quackery or something (I don’t know the exact legal expression, but spreading medical misinformation for profit while pretending to be a medical professional is a crime in Hungary), but the case seems to be getting nowhere with the police uninterested in such a complicated case with very low rewards.

    I’d guess that due to lower regulations or more incompetent police or just in general less interest in spreading English language quackery, probably a lot of similar stuff is run by some Russians (for profit), or from Russian servers: the Russian authorities probably don’t care much, while other authorities might find it difficult to get them. This is then chalked up to an official Russian “disinformation campaign” run by the Kremlin, based on zero evidence. But perhaps there is some evidence for the stuff being run from Russian servers.

    Anyway, it’s interesting that even they admit that the anti-vaxer groups had already been there, just “infiltrated” by the “Russian trolls.”

  2. The graph coincides with the Mortgage Crisis of 2008. Looks like Ukrainians invested heavily in the US because they crashed hard.

  3. Spisarevski says

    It all makes sense!

    https://i.imgur.com/6qqdVQr.jpg

    For those who don’t read German…I mean, Russian, the text says “It seems to me that poison and Jews seldom do good things.”

  4. I hope that Thorfinnsson reads this one. He’ll fall off of his chair laughing when he sees that you’ve also become infected with the Hack’s Law syndrome* 🙂

    * the longer things progress, the sooner they converge to a Ukrainian topic.

  5. UrbaneFrancoOntarian says

    When is the Russian demographic update coming out?

    AK: Good things come to those who wait.

  6. If it would be true, then the modern civilisation would have close to zero chance of surviving another generation. If all it takes are a few ‘infiltrators‘ spreading evil ‘agendas‘, then just about anything can happen. This level of fragility would be laughed off in more normal times.

    I understand that these are extremes, a few seriously unbalanced and infantile people. But the fact that they are allowed to run around unsupervised spouting absolute nonsense reflects very badly on the West. I would worry less about foreign infiltrators (well, they are always Russian somehow), and more about a loss of intellectual ballast and what it will lead to. At this point having a war to clear the sh..t from people’s minds might be the least bad solution. There is no way back from paranoia and madness, it just slowly accelerates.

  7. Well its not a Measles outbreak in Spain is it.

  8. Yeah because Ukrs are driving the epidemic. Their pro-Western orientation certainly paid off you Banderovite piece of shit!

  9. When I suggested that in 2-3 more decades Russia will become responsible for the Holocaust,

    Why not? Holodomor, Holocaust, it’s hard to keep things straight.

  10. If you can make the folks believe the Holodomor narrative, you can make them believe the Russians did Holocaust.

  11. It’s pretty messed up how they don’t tell people the truth about how the Amur and Ussuri Cossacks snuck across the Pacific to kill the Indians before their friends in the US Army like Sheridan could come save them. Or even about how Peter the Great built the Baltic Fleet to hunt down innocent Africans and introduced chattel slavery to the Americas. Smh.

  12. Philip Owen says

    The Russian social network VK.COM does not ban anti-vax. My Rodnveri (roughly far right hippies) friends regularly post anti-vax items.

  13. Another collapse under the Maidan regime, albeit with a partial recovery at the end.

    Actually the immunization rate in 2017 is higher than it ever was under Yanukovich.

  14. Thorfinnsson says

    Anti-vax sentiment is moving down the class ladder in America and being transformed in the process.

    A 20-year old proletarian mother I am acquainted with informed me she is not vaccinating her brood because vaccines cause Down’s Syndrome.

    The original claim, as I understand, is that vaccines cause autism.

    I don’t have much of an opinion on that matter as I haven’t looked into it much. I know I got the standard vaccines as a child, and I got a few vaccines for tropical diseases and such in adulthood. Is it true they now vaccinate kids for Chicken Pox?

  15. “Gift” really is one of the funniest false cognates.

  16. for-the-record says

    Here’s the CDC Recommended Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule for ages 18 years or younger.

    https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolescent.html

    As you will see chickenpox (varicella) is included.

  17. Yup, the vaccine for Chicken pox has been around for a while now too, maybe 15 years or so.

    I think I had a mild case, but I knew people who were scarred by it. Not in a face-breaking way, but something that would bother a woman, if she looked in the mirror.

    I think live vaccines had a certain danger. The live polio vaccine gave some people polio. My older brother had a bad reaction to a live vaccine as a toddler. He’s okay now, but I’m told it really did something to him for a short time.

    Seems to me antivaxers are mostly people with a purity instinct, like vegans, or organic food people. Mostly left, but some libertarian types. You would think they’d be against miscegenation or something, but I guess that is a different module.

  18. for-the-record says

    “Gift” really is one of the funniest false cognates.

    It’s actually a real cognate, not a false one. German Gift originally meant “gift” (a meaning preserved in Mitgift “dowry”) before undergoing a somewhat radical (but far from unprecedented) semantic evolution: a dose that the doctor gives the patient [note that dose comes from the Greek for "giving"], and then it followed the same path that transformed potion into poison.

  19. That is pretty interesting and odd – still you can’t take away how Japanese answer the telephone – that is pretty funny in German.

  20. In other words, all of its declines in immunization rates happened precisely when Ukraine was deepest under American influence

    It gets better, worst affected after Banderastan is…..Gruziya! Big measles and Swine flu epidemic over there…which is of course, just like in Ukraine a place where the US have been using humans as guinea pigs in the bio-lab they have over there

  21. Actually the immunization rate in 2017 is higher than it ever was under Yanukovich

    errmmm ….No you dumb POS. Also the fact that now it is way below pre-Orange levels ..IN A TIME OF EPIDEMIC ,is pitiful in the extreme

    Cost, availability, corruption and the bankruptness ( actual and moral of the Ukrainian state) are just as much , if not more of a problem then people unwilling to go for vaccination.
    Seeing as Gruzia also seems to be having the same problems, biological testing can’t be ruled out as a partial cause.
    Twice as much measles outbreak in Ukraine as the rest of Europe combined , that’s not forgetting all the massively increased rates in Ukraine of TB, Diphtheria and who knows, maybe even Polio .

    Meanwhile in Russia, a place where millions of ukrops and gruzians visit and work……the authorities, unlike in parasite Ukraine ,work to actually control and eradicate it, 28 times less infections then in Ukraine, no deaths…with the main sources being kavkaz and central asian workers going to Moscow and Saint Petersburg

    Which then brings me to the lamentable point of what a farce that overseeing this disaster in Ukraine is an American Banderatard Nazi bitch sadist hippy Dr Death corrupt wackjob (Ulana Suprun, sister of a CIA agent). The worst domestically rated politician in the cesspit of Ukraine…even worse that a dumb American who doesn’t understand the country, the system, the soviet-system the bitch is supposedly trying to overhaul, or the people – is being allowed to kill the country.
    There is a lesson or fable there…and that’s not even going into the fact that healthcare as GDP % is the lowest now , then at any time in Ukraine – something in the 2% range. Or the lefe expectancy in Russia superceeding ukropia AFTER Maidan! A farce

    but it is easier being some deranged fucktard Banderatard spamtroll with fantasist nonsense and zero intention of ever living or working in Ukraine, or wasting even 1 dollar in donation to this fake country………it’s another thing actually living in it and suffering from insidious PR, lies and from North American banderatard fucktards bringing disaster to this land

  22. Akshually Anatoly could(and should) just post recent epic photos from ukrainian plague barracks only insane svidomit would call hospitals. Would be a great demonstration of innate khohol drive for prosperity and cleanliness, away from le ebil bear. ^_^

  23. Khohol just shot itself in the foot, as it always does. When they were getting good vaccines from Russia all was fine, but now they are so euro-oriented, they get their generic poison from streetshitter land, with entirely predictable results.

    Oh, and low-IQ yankee puppet for minister of health doesn`t help either, of course.

  24. Actually the immunization rate in 2017 is higher than it ever was under Yanukovich.

    It still remains to be seen what kind of filth the Doctor Death, Suprun gave the people.

  25. Would be a great demonstration of innate khohol drive for prosperity and cleanliness, away from le ebil bear. ^_^

    lol

  26. Spisarevski says

    I think it’s not purity instinct, also the way vaccines work makes perfect logical sense and is intuitive enough for most people.
    The daily stormer had an excellent article on the matter which I can’t find right now. Basically it’s people who can no longer trust their institutions acting in their interest even on the most basic level.
    Then you add the political angles – expressing any doubts about vaccination risks gets you branded as a right-wing hillbilly retard by the establishment, and the left’s desire for primacy of state over family over the children.

    Taking the parents’ holy right to make decisions for the children they created, their own flesh and blood, is a huge issue that goes way beyond vaccines.
    A few days ago I have seriously started thinking about emigrating to Russia because of this – there is a new “strategy for the children” being adopted in Bulgaria which basically prohibits you from telling your child what to do. The aim of the strategy is obviously so people aren’t able to raise anything other than a useless faggot or future whore.
    I can’t rely on Bulgarian society supposedly being “based” or naturally conservative to always ignore such laws. There was plenty of common sense in the West before too, all it takes is a few decades of brainwashing and I see the new generations here already being more and more hopeless. I want to have children in the near future, but raising children in any EU country, even if it’s some irrelevant shithole on the periphery where I am actually home, seems more and more risky.

  27. Bies Podkrakowski says

    When I suggested that in 2-3 more decades Russia will become responsible for the Holocaust

    Get your own Holocaust you lazy bums. I’ve it on good American authority that the Holocaust is Polish and Nazi.

  28. The tb and smallpox vaccines are injected into the skin, form a blister and leave a scar, but they’re generally not given in developed countries. There’s a reasonable level of opposition to these from people unlikely to ever come into contact with tb on the grounds of being branded a third worlder.

  29. anony-mouse says

    Lot of Unz writers write for the anti-vax website global research (which is also very pro-Russia).

  30. Toronto Russian says

    I understood the necessity of measles vaccination when I read the 1930 book Diary of a Provincial Lady. The heroine catches measles as an adult and is temporarily blinded, that’s scary as hell.

    The doctor comes to see me, says that he thinks my eyelashes will grow again—(should have preferred something much more emphatic, but am too much afraid of further reference to my age to insist)—and agrees to my joining children at Bude next week. He also, reluctantly, and with an air of suspicion, says that I may use my eyes for an hour every day, unless pain ensues.

    http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks08/0800661h.html

    Measles played a part in the tragedy of the Romanov family, in February 1917 three daughters of Nicholas II got sick with it and the family couldn’t make preparations for escape (then the English king didn’t give them asylum in England, and it was too late to try something else). The girls’ heads were shaved for hygienic reasons, and the fourth daughter, in a touching gesture, shaved off her hair too. There exist photos of them without hair. How lucky are we to not have to deal with this disease anymore.

  31. John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan says

    I, for one, am not an “anti-vaxxer” but I do refuse to take the flu shot. And being against the flu shot is conflated all too often with “anti-vax” in total. The purpose of a vaccination is to prevent disease, and I defy anyone to prove that the flu shot actually does that. At any rate, it’s not the same as being completely anti-vax.

  32. Russia is responsible for the lack of evidence of Supersymmetry at the LHC!

  33. and I defy anyone to prove that the flu shot actually does that.

    Hasn’t heard about statistics

    Just stay off the streets ok, blondie.

    Literally first result in “influenza vaccination effects on herd immunity”:

    https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lanpub/PIIS2468-2667(17)30004-X.pdf

    Or you can grab

    “Effect of Influenza Vaccination of Childrenon Infection Rates in Hutterite Communities: A Randomized Trial”

    off Sci Hub.

  34. Teenage Russian fanboy writes like teenage Russian fanboy.

  35. Spisarevski says

    A wise man always discards any “study” that contradicts his personal direct observations. As I said in another thread:

    I haven’t had a flu shot in more than 25 years and I haven’t got the flu in the last quarter of a century. My colleague does a flu shot almost every year and also gets the flu almost every year.

    Vaccination in general obviously works, but the issue is obviously politicized as well, so any risks will be hidden and denied, and benefits exaggerated.

    By the way your link is literally not a study, but a one-page “news” article with a pun in the subject, i.e. something that could have been published in Guardian or Buzzfeed.