There’s no end to the variety of bizarre rumors circulating about COVID-19 vaccines: recipients’ bodies become magnetized, perhaps, or connected to 5G signals. Many assume that such tales are cooked up by eccentrics, but some of the rumor-mongering has more sinister origins. In August 2021, for example, Facebook uncovered a huge, Russia-based anti-vaccination campaign, in which hundreds of fake accounts were working in coordination to spread the belief that people who received the AstraZeneca vaccine were being tainted by injected chimpanzee tissue. Such misinformation campaigns have become a worrisome feature of the modern threat landscape, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has just awarded $5.8 million to a team, led by CSL’s Tarek Abdelzaher, that will work to characterize how different foreign populations respond to influence campaigns as a first step towards development of effective countermeasures.
