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Excerpts from:
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Promoting anti-public health misinformation in poor countries: A common antivax theme
So what is the Brownstone Institute up to in Uganda? According to Alice McCool and Khatondi Soita Wepukhulu, it’s behind a campaign called End Lockdown Now:
US Christian legal organisation Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and Texas-based libertarian think tank the Brownstone Institute are among the organisations backing Uganda’s ‘End Lockdown Now’ campaign.
And:
End Lockdown Now has platformed anti-vax, anti-mask, anti-lockdown and pandemic-denying arguments, with journalists and scientists from Europe and Australia among those spreading misinformation to Ugandans at the group’s online events. One such event was hosted by ADF.
And:
Just 5% of Uganda’s population is fully vaccinated, with the country on the cusp of reopening after one of the world’s longest and toughest lockdowns. Last week the virus was the number two cause of death in the country.
End Lockdown Now was launched in June by Ugandan lawyer and preacher Simon Ssenyonga, It has platformed arguments for the use of ivermectin, an unproven treatment for the virus, and a recent Facebook post shared by the campaign claims that PCR testing is not a valid way to detect COVID. Ssenyonga insists his organisation is “not a misinformation campaign” and says it does not “propagate” the use of ivermectin.
Brownstone Institute founder Jeffrey Tucker, who made the “natural immunity” claim, also stated falsely at the same event that COVID-19 vaccines were “a technology that’s not been proven as safe and effective”.
But wait! I thought that Tucker and Brownstone were “provaccine”! He even says so when contacted by the journalists:
Asked for comment, Tucker said: “Though neither scientist nor doctor, I am a fan of vaccines for those who will benefit from them and the Brownstone Institute has published articles favouring vaccination against COVID. Lockdowns are the worst assault on the poor, working-class communities and small businesses all over the world.”
I searched the Brownstone Institute for such articles in all its articles tagged with “vaccines“. I can’t help but wonder if Tucker meant articles like the one about the “monumental sacrifice of Novak Djokovic,” the one lamenting the “defenstration of Dr. Robert Malone” (who, recall, has gone full antivax lately and was a headliner at a recent antivax confab), the one portraying the “denial” of “natural immunity” as “psychological cruelty” (by Tucker himself!), or the one touting “146 studies” that prove “natural immunity” is better than vaccine-induced immunity (they don’t). Maybe he meant Vaccines Save Lives, which, despite its title, is chock full of antivax omissions, factual errors, and flaws in logic, as recounted by Jonathan Howard, or maybe the concession in an article about COVID-19 that it “would appear that vaccination is protective of severe disease” that attributed strokes and cardiac deaths to the vaccine while arguing that masks don’t work.
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Brownstone Institute: Same as it ever was
Antivaxxers have a long and horrible history of trying to export their message to minorities and poor nations, populations where antivaccine messaging can do the most harm. I first started discussing this unfortunate tactic many years ago, when antivaxxers targeted the Somalian immigrant community in Minnesota with Andrew Wakefield’s message that the MMR vaccine causes autism (with Wakefield himself appearing there at least once), resulting in years and years of intermittent measles outbreaks. In 2019, mere months before the pandemic hit, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and other antivaxxers targeted Samoa, which at the time was in the middle of one of the worst measles outbreaks imaginable, with dozens of deaths. The misinformation about MMR and measles spread by RFK Jr. and his acolytes (including a letter by RFK Jr. himself to the Samoan Prime Minister mere weeks before the outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease in Wuhan, China started making the news) hampered vaccination campaigns for months.
Here in the US, these efforts take the form of targeting minorities, particularly communities of color, to spread conspiracy theories about vaccines, using examples of medical atrocities from history like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, to stoke the fear and mistrust that lead to vaccine hesitancy in these communities. How is what Brownstone Institute-associated people are doing in Uganda by appearing at local events virtually any different than these previous efforts to stoke vaccine hesitancy? It isn’t, other than being virtual appearances, rather than the in-person appearances that antivaxxers made in, for example, Minnesota.
Deny it as much as Jeffrey Tucker might, the Brownstone Institute has tilted decisively in the direction of spreading antivaccine misinformation. If there was ever any doubt, seeing Suntra Gupta herself argue two months ago that the way out of the pandemic was “natural herd immunity” through “repeated infection” with different strains of COVID-19 and “our long history of previous exposure to seasonal coronaviruses may well have protected many of us from severe Covid-19”. (Ironically, she didn’t mention Omicron, which at the time was preparing to take off in the US and globally, thanks to its increased transmissibility compared to Delta and its ability to evade previous immunity, both vaccine-induced and “natural.”) I knew, even fifteen months ago, that the Great Barrington Declaration signatories and everyone associated with that misbegotten piece of astroturf were going to go this way.
Sadly, given how influential this dangerous advocacy of eugenics has been, it’s hard not to conclude that the Great Barrington Declaration signatories and think tanks have won. Oddly enough, though, they refuse to take credit for millions of infected children and young adults that resulted from their influence in the US and Europe and are trying to export their “success” to poor African countries. Ideology is a powerful drug.
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weehingthong 
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