Fauxi: Undermining Authoritative Health Sources
Authors: Erin McAweeney (Graphika), Lily Meyersohn (Stanford Internet Observatory), Avneesh Chandra (Graphika)
The June 1 release of thousands of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails from his National Institutes of Health account gave the public a glimpse into the challenges experienced by US government officials in the early days of the pandemic. The emails were obtained via FOIA requests submitted by the Washington Post and Buzzfeed News and were published by each outlet. Although they were obtained legally, anti-vaccine and conservative influencers have largely referred to the documents as “leaked emails,” and quickly began to produce stories alleging that they revealed Fauci’s deep ties to the Chinese government, dishonesty in public communications about the lab leak theory of the virus, and otherwise-nefarious intentions for prolonging the pandemic and lying to the public.
An Instagram post insinuates that Fauci was conspiring with the CCP.
This tactic is not incidental. For years, incentivized influencers have repeatedly undermined and delegitimized authoritative health sources, public health institutions, and health experts. This continual process of seeding doubt and uncertainty in authoritative voices leads to a society that finds it too challenging to identify what’s true or false, loses confidence in the scientific process overall, or becomes more susceptible to harmful misinformation from a source that they like or trust. Sowing distrust in health authorities also provides an opportunity for incentivized influencers to further manipulate communities that might already err on the side of being anti-vaccine, vaccine-skeptical, or vaccine-hesitant. These beliefs and concerns might originate for different reasons or out of different local histories — religious affiliations; frustration with a prohibitively-expensive and opaque medical system; or a weariness of institutions that have historically exploited or mistreated minority communities — and the additional erosion of trust in reputable authorities compounds them.
While the specific campaigns to undermine authoritative sources of information vary, each one carries the broader aim of undermining the validity of the expertise and guidance of health institutions and delegitimizing their scientific “objectivity” in the eyes of the American public. Specifically, Dr. Fauci, the CDC, and the FDA have been recurring targets for anti-vaccine, conspiratorial groups, and conservative leaders because of their key role in making public health decisions for the US and managing the official data used to make those decisions. Influencers and online groups use repeated tactics and tropes to attack institutions hoping to delegitimize public health authorities, government agencies, and the companies who develop vaccines.
Fauci Emails
On June 1, the Washington Post and Buzzfeed reported on the contents of FOIA-obtained emails sent by Dr. Fauci in April 2020. Among the emails were speculations about whether the virus looked engineered based on limited data and preliminary analyses, and Fauci sharing scientifically accepted mask advice. Conservative influencers and anti-vaccine activists who posted about the emails, however, asserted that Fauci’s public health recommendations were driven by “bureaucracy”, implying that his scientific objectivity was tainted by political connections and engagements. In the most extreme claims, Fauci’s guidance was questioned due to a purportedly too-close relationship with the Chinese government. Some attacked the validity of his expertise with familiar claims that Fauci had “flip-flopped” on various public health recommendations since the early days of the pandemic, especially on mask guidance.
The FOIA’d emails were manipulated to corroborate old claims. In the wake of the emails’ release, influencers freshly asserted that Fauci had lied to the public, using this as evidence that people should not receive the vaccine. Some anti-vaccine influencers commonly referred to him as a health official or an expert using quotations to imply he did not deserve the titles, while others claimed Fauci was a fraud and a snake oil salesman. In addition to challenging his integrity, anti-vaccine and conspiracy theorist accounts also emphasized Fauci’s possible role in gain-of-function research (referenced in his emails). Gain-of-function research — a risky procedure that alters organisms to increase their pathogenicity and transmissibility — is not without its controversy. However, the kernel of truth regarding gain-of-function’s risks was misrepresented as a vast conspiracy theory that implicates Fauci and accuses him of creating a bioweapon. Tucker Carlson’s June 3 segment on the emails illustrated these seemingly paradoxical narratives, presenting Fauci as simultaneously an incompetent fraud and a scheming political and scientific mastermind. Carlson states:
“We’re Americans so we assume the man in charge of protecting the US from Covid must be rational and impressive. We also assumed he must be honest, but we were wrong. It soon became clear that Tony Fauci was just another sleazy Federal bureaucrat. Deeply political and often dishonest. […] Fauci supported the grotesque and dangerous experiments that appeared to have made Covid possible.”
A Facebook post uses the Fauci emails to justify not receiving a Covid-19 vaccine.
In addition to critiques of Fauci as a government bureaucrat, critics also recycled accusations that mass vaccination amounted to unethical medical testing. Popular posts invoked the Nuremberg trials, drawing a parallel between healthcare workers facilitating the vaccination program and doctors convicted of committing horrific war crimes in Nazi concentration camps. This historical analogy has previously been exploited in campaigns to harass and silence other outspoken, pro-vaccine scientists. Candace Owens, a conservative talk show host and political commentator, similarly called to take Fauci to court after the release of his emails. Other influencers and anti-vaccine activists echoed calls to #FireFauci. And far-right members of Congress, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, have now called for a full investigation into Fauci’s involvement in the unproven Wuhan bioweapon lab leak conspiracy.
But Fauci is not the first or only pro-vaccine figure whose credentials and legitimacy as a scientist have been attacked online. These same communities have attempted to undermine public health institutions for years.
CDC & FDA: Undermining institutional standards and guidelines
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has long been a target for anti-vaccine activists attempting to discredit American public health institutions. These longstanding efforts include coordinated campaigns claiming that the CDC covered up data showing a link between vaccination and autism spectrum disorder, framed as the “#CDCWhistleblower” controversy on social media in 2014, and FOIAs filed against the CDC by the Informed Action Consent Network (ICAN). Erosion of confidence in agencies’ handling of the pandemic built on this pattern; in the early spring of 2020, the CDC became a routine target of COVID-19 and pandemic skepticism and denialism.
In several cases, distrust in the CDC has been fostered by influencers who create doubt in the agency’s own numbers and standards, no matter what those numbers and standards are. For example, they have claimed the CDC’s methods for reporting numbers for COVID-19 cases reveal the agency is a dishonest actor. In the initial stages of the pandemic, they said the CDC overreported numbers to impose stringent lockdown restrictions (often referred to as the “Scamdemic'' or “Casedemic” by conspiracists). Now, they say the CDC is underreporting numbers to inflate vaccine efficacy rates. They claimed the agency was underreporting by “covering up 99% of deaths'' of elderly people post-vaccination (as seen below), and later, by changing monitoring standards for breakthrough cases. In May 2021, the agency shifted to monitoring for breakthrough cases only in hospitalized or fatal cases, leading right-wing and anti-vaccine accounts to argue they had caught the CDC “red-handed” trying to make vaccines look better by artificially lowering case counts. Other statistics reported by the CDC have also been publicly disputed by known anti-vaccine figures, including Alex Berenson, a right-leaning writer who has frequently spread misinformation claims that garner over 1,000 engagements. Berenson has weaponized CDC findings to assert the agency is “tricking,” “lying,” “dishonest”, or “intentionally […] obscur[ing] the facts.” In these cases, the attempt to undermine the public’s trust in the CDC remains the common theme.
Blog post from Circle of Mamas suggesting the CDC knows the vaccine is “killing the elderly.”
Institutional decisions and guidelines from other agencies have also received vitriol. In March, a 17-tweet thread by Berenson implied the emergency use authorization (EUA) vaccine approval process undertaken by the FDA was politically corrupt. EUA has been a frequent target of anti-vaccine groups online as well as in the legal space. These groups have also targeted agency guidelines – guidelines that would necessarily be flexible, given the changing needs of the American public, the uneven rollout of vaccines, and new data on the virus, its variants, and effective prevention. But when the CDC updated its guidelines on school reopenings (long a controversial topic in the US), conservative groups rushed to accuse the Biden administration of manipulating CDC standards. As we have seen, framing America’s most prominent public health institutions as untrustworthy political entities is a clear and popular narrative that has circulated in various iterations for months. This distrust has been compounded by public health officials’ own failure to clearly communicate timely and trustworthy information to the public early in the pandemic.
Key routine narratives
Attacks on authoritative sources of health and science information thrive on the basis of consistent key themes and narratives, which are apparent in the attacks against Fauci, the CDC, and the FDA as discussed above. By casting expert entities as tyrannical, unaccountable villains, experts become the “they” in a “they versus us” narrative. Besides institutions like the FDA or the CDC, this role is also frequently filled by pharmaceutical companies. As noted, pharmaceutical companies and state agencies are not infallible: they are flawed organizations which may carry the specters of past, unrelated scandals. Those histories are leveraged, however, to condemn the current safety and efficacy of their products, particularly vaccines.
An Instagram post from an anti-vaccine account lists examples of evolved scientific consensus to discredit authorities.
These narratives often rely on unverified claims made with thin sourcing. In particular, anti-vaccine activists spread fear by misrepresenting the data or outcomes of vaccine clinical trials. Trials are portrayed as mysterious and unscientific, and their approval process is obscured, rather than clarified. In one case, multiple posts alleged that approval of the vaccine was illegitimate. These particular posts cited AstraZeneca’s use of a “non-compliant placebo” rather than a saline placebo. AstraZeneca did use two different placebos in trials, but the European Parliament has stated this “use of a different vaccine as comparator is acceptable” within their guidelines. Meanwhile, other online users have claimed that deaths went unreported (post removed) during trials.
These narratives exploit the public’s tenuous understanding of specialized processes, including clinical trial and approval procedures. For example, claims that animal trials were skipped because subjects were dying are based on misrepresentations of the approval process. Throughout March 2021, amplifiers of the hashtag #WeAreTheControl, too, claimed that COVID-19 vaccines can’t be trusted because they are still in clinical trials, basing their claim on links to the US National Library of Medicine’s webpage that implies trials are ongoing. These examples both rely on deceptive framing that takes advantage of readers’ lack of awareness about the long-term monitoring that extends the lifetime of these studies.
An example anti-vaccine post can be seen here adopting the above narratives.
Conclusion
Sources of sound, scientific health information are systematically compromised by vaccine misinformation and related disinformation, with the ultimate goal of reducing trust in public health institutions. If authoritative sources are no longer broadly trusted, the public may look to other sources to fill those gaps of information: most notably, to the influencers who are doing the work of undermining the health authorities in the first place. These incentivized influencers dissuade the public from taking safe and community-centered approaches to public health, and push their followers to products and practices that benefit them financially. The repeated, persistent undermining of authoritative health sources has a more insidious impact on the health information ecosystem, continually creating more space for predatorial sources of misinformation to thrive.