“An Instagram post says: “6,000% Increase in Reported Vaccine Deaths 1st Quarter 2021 Compared to 1st Quarter 2020.” An article from a media outlet called The Daily Expose carried the headline: “Number of women to lose their unborn child after having the COVID vaccine increases by 366% in just six weeks.”  The headline on an article from former GOP congressman Ron Paul’s website, shared widely on Facebook, reads: “Coronavirus Vaccinations Seem to be Causing 50 Times the Adverse Events of Flu Vaccinations after Just the First of Two Shots.” Politifact reports that: “We’ve fact-checked these claims and several others about the purported effects of the COVID-19 vaccines, and we found them to be false.”

The extreme number of reports related to the Covid19 vaccine has many wondering if anti-vaxxers, Trump supporters and possibly even Russian bot-nets are engaged in a fake comment campaign similar to the fake Net-Neutrality comments campaign recently discovered by the office of New York State Attorney General Letitia James.

The US State Department has already identified several websites that promoted disinformation designed to undermine faith in the Covid19 vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna, and information warfare experts claim that kind of approach is consistent with Russia’s history of having a “living off the land mentality”, where they quickly adapt to the information landscape and use whatever opportunity they can to try to weaken powerful nations. In this case, promotion of vaccine skepticism would be an effort to continue the need for masking and social distancing protocols, as well as the development of new infection hot spots within the United States. The high cost of treatment for Covid19 also means that the Federal Government will be saddled with increased Medicare and Medicaid costs, as hospital bills for ventilated ICU patients frequently run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Although the VAERS system notes that filing a false VAERS report is a violation of 18 U.S. Code § 1001, it’s extremely likely that most anti-vaxxers and Trump supporters (unless they read the comments on TheHill and are familiar with the work of the NationalZero community) have no idea what that section is, or they think that the government can’t charge you for filing a false report if you’re white. Ultimately, the only real solution to this problem may be to identify someone who knowingly submitted multiple false reports, see to it that they get sent away to Federal Prison for five years, and publicize the hell out of the story so that anti-vaxxers and Trump supporters can see that there can be consequequences for their actions, no matter how loudly you insist that you “ain’t no real criminal like one o’ them people from the city!”