The public health and economic catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic has also become a battle about the nature of truth itself. From the emergence of the first reports of a virus in Wuhan, China, opportunistic leaders in China, Russia, and elsewhere have inundated an already polluted Western information environment with disinformation and propaganda about the virus’s origins, cures, and most recently, vaccines. Both Beijing and Moscow have extensively utilized the global “vaccine race” to boost their public image and spread doubt about vaccine efficacy.

The Center for European Policy Analysis in collaboration with the Institute of Modern Russia hosts a discussion on the findings of and lessons learned from recently released reports, Jabbed in the Back and The Rise and Fall of Sputnik V, on how COVID-19 became a tool of information warfare.