We Did It by Executive Order.

Moscow Spent Ten Years Trying.

The Kremlin paid $43,000 to talk the West out of its own medicine and collected almost nothing. Then Washington shut the office that was keeping score.

In August 2020, the State Department published a report called Pillars of Russia's Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem. Fifty-odd pages, footnoted to the teeth, the kind of document somebody makes after being handed a budget and a mandate and deciding to take both seriously. It explained in flat bureaucratic prose how Moscow built a machine for making people unable to agree on what was true, and then it listed the parts by serial number.

Go looking for it now and you land on an archive. 2021-2025.state.gov. The dates sit in the address like a headstone.

The report was good. That matters, because it makes everything after it worse. It identified seven outlets laundering Kremlin material into Western feeds and showed its work on each. The Strategic Culture Foundation is directed by the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence service, and was run by a man who had been Moscow Party Chief and sat on the Politburo. New Eastern Outlook belongs to the Russian Academy of Sciences, a fact its English-language About page does not mention. Seat a retired SVR lieutenant general beside a retired FSB lieutenant general on your supervisory board, as Katehon did, and you do not have a think tank, whatever the letterhead says.

And News Front, out of occupied Crimea, where the report found an actual receipt. In 2016 Moscow routed three million rubles, about $43,000, through a nonprofit News Front's own editor and its own anchor had founded and registered at the outlet's street address. A presidential grant. A former employee told a German paper that the security services covered a large part of the budget and that certain subjects came down directly from the presidential administration. Forty-three thousand dollars. You could not repaint a firehouse for that.

What did it buy? It funded a campaign to keep people away from medicine.

News Front told readers that COVID vaccines were a fraud run by Bill Gates and Big Pharma. From Katehon, the flat proposition that science doubts vaccines work. Geopolitica.ru, house organ of the ultranationalist Alexander Dugin, connected a Microsoft patent number to the number of the beast in Revelation, which sounds too stupid to matter until you remember what people were willing to believe that year. And a SouthFront contributor wondered aloud whether a mandatory shot might carry a slow killer, or a gene that renders women infertile.

In May of 2021 an outfit calling itself Fazze, claiming a London address where it was not registered, started emailing science YouTubers in France and Germany. Léo Grasset had 1.1 million subscribers. Mirko Drotschmann had 1.5 million. The instructions ran specific. The main conclusion was to be that the death rate among people vaccinated with Pfizer ran nearly triple the rate among those given AstraZeneca. Avoid the words advertising and sponsored. Act like you have the passion and interest in this topic. Present it as your own independent view. Fazze called the budget considerable and offered whatever rate you wish.

Grasset asked who the client was. Fazze declined to say. He went public instead, and by Tuesday the company had taken down its site and locked its Instagram. Facebook removed 308 accounts and banned the firm, and said the work ran primarily out of Russia for a client it could not identify. One of the fake accounts claimed the AstraZeneca shot would turn you into a chimpanzee.

Then the story stops behaving. It did not work. Some of the posts drew not one reply. And it was never about vaccines. The same machine warning Africans off a malaria shot sold Sputnik V with both hands, and a study in the American Journal of Public Health found Russian troll accounts pushing pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine material in nearly equal measure. Moscow did not care whether you took the shot. Moscow cared that you could no longer tell who was lying to you. That was the product. The vaccine was the demonstration model.

So a foreign government spent real money to poison the well and the well tested clean. That ought to be the happy ending. In June of 2024 Reuters reported that the Pentagon had run its own covert anti-vaccine campaign. Out of trailers at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, at least 300 fake accounts impersonating Filipinos pushed the hashtag Chinaangvirus, Tagalog for China is the virus, to discredit Sinovac. Part of the strategy pushed the disputed claim that because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, the Chinese shot was forbidden under Islamic law. The operation began in the spring of 2020 and ran into the middle of 2021. The Pentagon stood by it after publication.

Sinovac was the only vaccine in the Philippines. Our own shots did not arrive in quantity for months. We told a Catholic country with a Muslim south, in the middle of the worst death rates in its region, not to take the only medicine it had, because Beijing got there first.

That is why officials in Washington understood the Russian technique so precisely. They were running it.

On December 23, 2024, the legal authority for the Global Engagement Center expired because Congress declined to renew it. About 120 people, $50 million a year. State folded the work into a successor bureau, R/FIMI, and on April 16, 2025, Marco Rubio closed that one too, saying it had actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans it was supposed to be serving. He made the argument in an op-ed published the same day in The Federalist, which was at that moment suing his department over exactly this.

The complaint was not invented. Give it its due. Global Engagement Center money reached the Global Disinformation Index, which scored news organizations for advertisers, and conservative publishers lost revenue when the scores came back low. Texas sued in December of 2023 alongside The Daily Wire and The Federalist, naming the department, GDI, and NewsGuard. A government office funding a system that decides which United States publications advertisers should avoid is a real problem, and calling the program foreign-facing does not make it one.

Grant every word of that. The remedy still does not follow. The grievance concerned grants to third-party ratings outfits. The response abolished the inventory, and by September of 2025 the department announced it had halted all frameworks for countering foreign information manipulation. Not reformed. Halted.

That is the watch. You knock the thing down and then you go looking for what you missed. Ceilings come down with a pike pole. You open the chases and the void spaces and the gap behind the baseboard where a wire runs, and you lay the back of your hand flat on the plaster, because heat travels where you cannot see it and the hand knows before the eye does. Then you soak what you found. Then you leave somebody in the rig with the pump idling and nothing to do for two hours, and the whole time he is sitting there the house smells like wet char and everybody has gone home. It is the least glamorous duty in the service and it looks, to anyone driving past, exactly like a man being paid to sit. Nobody thanks you for a fire watch. You only hear about it when nobody posted one.

The machine is still running. This January EU DisinfoLab reported sanctions have not stopped the Social Design Agency's networks, which still route through intermediaries and hosting providers, some inside the European Union. The Justice Department named Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin's first deputy chief of staff, as the man directing it, which is to say the case is open, the operation has an address, and nobody is working it.

And on January 5 of this year, the fire came back through the wall on our side. A rekindle does not announce itself. It comes up through the same studs you already soaked, in a room you already called clear.

A newborn gets the hepatitis B shot in the first day, usually before it leaves the delivery room. The reason is arithmetic. The CDC puts the odds at nine in ten that an infant infected at birth carries the virus for life, and about a quarter of those children die early of liver failure or liver cancer. Screening the mother catches most of it. The gap is why the needle goes into the thigh before anyone can be certain, and it has gone in on day one since 1991, and infection at birth in the United States has all but disappeared.

Then federal health officials cut the routinely recommended childhood schedule from 17 vaccines to 11. Flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, meningococcal, and RSV came off, reserved now for high-risk groups. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had already emptied the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the panel that normally does that work, and named its replacements himself. They declined to recommend COVID shots even for high-risk patients, and voted to stop recommending most newborn hepatitis B doses. The CDC rewrote its vaccine safety page to contradict the scientific conclusion that vaccines do not cause autism. On March 16 a federal judge stayed the schedule, stayed 13 of Kennedy's appointments, and voided every committee vote taken after June 11, 2025. The government appealed. On May 29, Trump signed an executive order telling the CDC to realign the schedule anyway.

Now hold that against what Moscow was selling in 2021, carefully, because the easy version of this sentence is wrong. Trump took the opposite line from Putin's. Operation Warp Speed was his, he claimed credit for it at every opportunity, and in December of 2021 his own crowd booed him in Dallas when he admitted he had taken a booster. The Kremlin was running the hepatitis-and-infertility material while the man now signing the executive orders was demanding a medal for the shot.

Nobody took an order. Nobody needed to. The claims Moscow paid to plant in 2021, that the schedule is too crowded, that hepatitis B at birth is unnecessary, that the safety record is a pharmaceutical fiction, arrived at federal policy six years later carrying an American passport and a presidential signature. That is the worse outcome of the two. A foreign operation you can sanction. A domestic one you have to outvote.

Moscow spent a decade and a fortune trying to convince the West that nothing could be known, and collected zero replies. Washington ran the same trick in Manila, kept the receipts to itself, and then closed the only office whose whole job was writing down what happened, and did it in the name of honesty.

Forty-three thousand dollars, and it never took. Six years on, it arrives by executive order, at scale, over the signature of the man who wanted a medal for the shot, with the curb empty and nobody left who was paid to smell smoke.

Further Reading

GEC Special Report, Pillars of Russia's Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem, U.S. Department of State, August 2020. https://2017-2021.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Pillars-of-Russia's-Disinformation-and-Propaganda-Ecosystem_08-04-20.pdf

Broniatowski et al., Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate, American Journal of Public Health 108(10), October 2018. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6137759

Reuters, Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic, 14 June 2024.

Congressional Research Service, Termination of the State Department's Global Engagement Center, IN12475. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12475

Congressional Research Service, The 2026 Childhood Immunization Schedule, R48982. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48982

Congressional Research Service, Changes to CDC Vaccine Recommendations in 2025 and 2026, IN12684. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12684

EUvsDisinfo, Seeing the whole picture: a new way to track Russian FIMI, January 2026. https://euvsdisinfo.eu/seeing-the-whole-picture-a-new-way-to-track-russian-fimi/