openDemocracy. US taxpayer money has funded a controversial health news website in Armenia that is spreading “incredibly dangerous” COVID-19 misinformation, openDemocracy can reveal.
Public health experts in the US and Armenia denounced this content – which includes claims that vaccines currently being developed are actually “biological weapons”.
The website, Medmedia.am, was launched in 2019 – amid a mushrooming of new ultra-conservative groups following Armenia’s 2018 ‘velvet revolution’ – by an NGO led by a locally well-known doctor with anti-LGBT views and far-right connections.
Medmedia.am was established with money from the Democracy Commission Small Grants programme, awarded to the NGO by the US embassy in Armenia last year. These grants, intended to “promote democracy”, are worth up to $50,000 a year.
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In May, the site’s most-read page called on Armenians to “refuse all potential [COVID-19] vaccination programmes”. It has had 131,000 views and 28,000 social media likes (big numbers in a country with a population of less than 3 million).
The second most popular piece claimed, incorrectly, that a morgue offered 100,000 AMD ($205) to a dead patient’s relatives to sign a document saying the death was caused by COVID-19. Other recent pieces have described COVID-19 as a “fake pandemic”.
Paul Offit, a US doctor, immunology expert and co-inventor of a vaccine against rotavirus (a leading cause of severe diarrhoea in children under five years old), told openDemocracy: “I think that this misinformation is incredibly dangerous.”
Gayane Sahakyan, National Immunisation Project Leader at the Ministry of Health in Armenia, warned that “such misinformation could worsen COVID-19 infections.”
Those pushing false claims during the crisis “are trying to sow havoc,” she said, “and cut the demand for the vaccine long before it is even developed.”
On 28 May, Armenia had had just over 8,200 coronavirus cases to date – but this number has almost quadrupled from around 2,200 at the start of May. Infections are rising, and on 25 May the country reported a single-day record of 452 new cases.
Officials fear that conspiracy theories could impede the country’s COVID-19 response – and its recovery. Minister of Health Arsen Torosyan said that “if the anti-vax campaign continues at the same pace, Armenia will criminalise it.”
Sahakyan added that the country already saw a drop in childhood vaccination rates in 2019 as anti-vax theories spread before the onset of coronavirus.
Tatev Hovhannisyan
