Study information warfare long enough and certain things start to jump out at you. Earlier this evening this author had one of those “I’m pretty sure I know what that is” moments while reading an article over at that other website. The user “Obamabinbiden”, who used to frequent this site and is widely suspected of being some variety of GOP/GRU troll, repeatedly made this statement:

Why would a suspected troll keep telling people to get their kidney proteins checked in a story about a potential winter Covid19 surge? Then it hit me: stories about a pandemic of “deaths of despair” by Nobel prize-winning economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have repeatedly mentioned that alcoholic liver disease has becoming a leading cause of death among non-college educated whites in rural America. The link between liver and kidney failure is a condition known as Hepatorenal disease. There’s a very good chance that if you take a random sampling of rural white males who have only a high-school education, the core demographic of the “Trump base”, that around 10 to 20% of that group (and possibly many more) will have symptoms of alcoholic liver disease. If that group hasn’t been paying attention to the condition of their liver, and suddenly they’re told to get their liver enzymes and kidney proteins checked by an anti-vax group on social media, and 10 to 20% of that group come back with a positive test result indicating they have a swollen liver and kidney problems, that’s more than enough to drive a new conspiracy theory and have Trump supporters all across the country insisting that “I got the Covid19 vaccine and it destroyed my liver and messed up my kidneys!”.

Now we just have to wait and see what happens.