OK, brand new troll on deck..................coming out swinging.
March 12 2022
Russia's baseless claims about secret American biological warfare labs in Ukraine are taking root in the U.S. too, uniting COVID-19 conspiracy theorists, QAnon adherents and some supporters of ex-President Donald Trump.
Despite rebuttals from independent scientists, Ukrainian leaders and officials at the White House and Pentagon, the online popularity of the claims suggests some Americans are willing to trust Kremlin propaganda over the U.S. media and government.
Like any effective conspiracy theory, the Russian claim relies on some truths: Ukraine does maintain a network of biological labs dedicated to research into pathogens, and those labs have received funding and research support from the U.S.
But the labs are owned and operated by Ukraine, and the work is not secret. It's part of an initiative called the
Biological Threat Reduction Program that aims to reduce the likelihood of deadly outbreaks, whether natural or manmade. The U.S. efforts date back to work in the 1990s to dismantle the former Soviet Union’s program for weapons of mass destruction.
The day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, an early version appeared on Twitter — in a thread espousing the idea that Russia's offensive was targeting “US biolabs in Ukraine” — and was soon amplified by the conspiracy theory website Infowars. It has spread across mainstream and lower-profile social platforms, including Telegram and Gab, that are popular with far-right Americans, COVID-19 conspiracy theorists and adherents of QAnon, the baseless hoax that Satan-worshipping pedophiles secretly shape world events.
And as usual with RWNJ's misses........................AGAIN.