Or so it seems. It's always hard to tell. But that would make more sense in this case than trying to market their vaccine, and more consistent with past behavior.
Brazil however has a high vaccine acceptance, around 95% of the population want to be vaccinated, therefore Brazil has a huge market for vaccine (internal market and as distribution hub for south America) and in that case, I see how market their vaccine would make sense, specially now that there is a strong lobby there trying to get it approved by the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency (Anvisa)
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-health-regulat...
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-health-regulat...
Not quite sure what your suggesting here - I’m having some trouble following your logic.
You seem to be implying that the US vaccination rate problems are because Trump was anti-vax, but that’s not remotely accurate. In fact, during the last presidential campaign it was the opposition who were skeptical of a ‘trump vaccine’.
Trump also got the shot, and encouraged people to get it too - he saw the vaccines as part of his presidential legacy.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Relevant quote from the abstract: "Our data demonstrate that Donald Trump, before his profile was suspended, was the main driver of vaccine misinformation on Twitter."
Instead, he spent so much time insisting that the virus was a hoax, or unimportant, that most people (including his supporters) think of him as anti-vaccine. There's an incredibly straight line between electoral support for him and vaccination rates:
https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/the-red-blue-divide-in-covi...
He really could have been the hero he imagines that he is. It would be so easy.
It's just warfare. Nothing so unusual about it, and historically not reserved to just Russians. Maybe that 'whataboutism' factor will sway them to permit me to suggest, here, that this is a window into a well-established Russian tactic, and it's the clarity of that window which has led to their mad scramble to suppress this information: including but not limited to the manipulation of Hacker News information management systems.
This is directly beneficial to them: the manipulation of COVID opinion not only turns enemy citizens against each other, but directly keeps a deadly and damaging virus alive and mutating in the wild. That is an immediate dividend when you're doing it on the territory of your geopolitical enemy.
Nothing new about this. And nothing 'without dividend' about it, either. It's pretty direct warfare through nontraditional methods, understandable if war is what you're waging. The traditional Russian way to handle this sort of thing is to get your message out across the widest possible range of mouthpieces. You are not taking sides, you are heightening the chaos and setting everybody up to mistrust everybody else. It's called the 'Zone' and is a well documented technique. Harmful to anything but an authoritarian system (and, I think, prone to worsen conditions even for that) but obviously effective.
It's presumably cheap, so it doesn't really matter if it moves the needle by .1 percentage point, or 1 point, or 10 points. It's good bang for the buck.
But unfortunately, I suspect that even if they stopped, it wouldn't be noticeably better here.
This noise also spreads internationally, so bad press in let's say UK, France and Germany might very well lead to "look, in the places they make those vaccines they don't trust them, why should we have them then?!" in countries where it is an open question.
No FUD necessary