British Army Information Warfare Unit Deployed to Counter “Vaccine Disinformation”

As the public roll out of the COVID-19 vaccine inches closer, the British army has deployed an Information Warfare Unit to counter “vaccine disinformation.”

According to leaked documents reported on by the Daily Mail, soldiers from the The Defence Cultural Specialist Unit are already monitoring the internet for Covid-19 content in order to find out what type of information British citizens are receiving.

The unit was first launched in Afghanistan in 2010 as a part of the army’s 77th Brigade. It has worked alongside psychological operations teams in Afghanistan, studying the behavior of the civilian population and giving cultural and linguistic advice to ground troops, according to the brigade’s website.

Soldiers will be reportedly launching a probe into vaccine disinformation from “hostile states” and will recruit professional and reserve soldiers to help in its tasks.

The Ministry of Defence told the Times that unit capabilities were “not being directed at the UK population; 77th Brigade do not, and have never, conducted any kind of action against British citizens”.

While it is unclear what constitutes “vaccine disinformation” it’s likely information that will fall under the “anti-vax” umbrella which can issue claims of a vaccine and autism connection or other skepticism.

The Unit is taking on a task similar to that of the GCHQ British spy agency who in November had begun an offensive cyber-operation with the stated goal of disrupting anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by “hostile” states.

While we are being lead to rest assured that these types of information operations won’t be aimed at the public and are only aimed at state actors, this might be difficult to fully believe considering what an anonymous source told the London Times at the start of the GCHQ anti-vax propaganda campaign.

Summit News reports:

Speaking anonymously to the London Times in November, a source noted that “GCHQ has been told to take out antivaxers online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda.”

The report noted that the spy agency was considering taking down websites and content that isn’t pro-vaccination, as well as ‘disrupting’ those creating the content  by “using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State.”

Great … so it appears that even being skeptical of “official” vaccine narratives will have you treated as a terrorist and ‘taken out’ online.

The seemingly hell bent nature of these campaigns to squash anything “anti-vax” is incredibly suspect as it is reasonable to believe a well rounded debate usually leads to more informed decisions.

UK regulators approved emergency authorization for the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine on Wednesday, becoming the first western nation to make such approval. Enough vaccines have been ordered to vaccinate 20 million people with millions more expected to be in the country by the end of the year.

Next week the roll out will begin with “hospital hubs” offering the shots to people over 80 years old and some health care workers.

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Joseph Jankowski is the Editor-at-Large for Planet Free Will. His works have been published by major news publications such as ZeroHedge.com and Infowars.com.