Video: NDN Talks w/Jessica Brandt About The Global Info War Over COVID Vaccines (4/6/21)

On April 6th NDN hosted a conversation with Jessica Brandt of the Alliance for Securing Democracy.  We talked about one of the most interesting new foreign policy battles of the early Biden era - the great power race between the US/West and authoritarian countries to vaccinate the world and be the ones to defeat COVID.  She's called her initial remarks "Harnessing the Truth in Service of a Lie: Russia, China, and Iran's Information Strategies in the Vaccine Contest." 

You can watch a recording of the event here, and Jessica's biography and important background readings are below. 

We are really excited about this discussion as it brought together important elements of the emerging Biden foreign policy vision which NDN has spent time working - the need to effectively counter rising illberalism around the world, and learning how to better engage and compete against Russian and Chinese information/hybrid war strategies. Jessica and her team have been doing path-breaking work in this area, and we think this will end up being one of our best events of the spring. 

From NDN, please review our call for the Biden Administration to launch a plan to defeat COVID in the Americas, and Simon's Letras Libres essay on the opportunity Joe Biden has to use the global effort to defeat COVID and build back better to reinvigorate the global liberal order imagined and built by the US after WWII.  

Background Reading

Influence-enza: How Russia, China, and Iran Have Shaped and Manipulated Coronavirus Vaccine Narratives (Alliance for Securing Democracy)

How China’s “wolf warrior” diplomats use Twitter to troll Beijing’s enemies (Vox)

How China's "wolf warrior" diplomats use and abuse Twitter (Brookings)

Leaks, Lies and Altered Tape - Russia's Maturing Information Manipulation Playbook (Alliance for Securing Democracy)

Jessica's Bio

Jessica Brandt is head of policy and research for the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. She was previously a fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, where her research focused on multilateral institutions and geopolitics, and where she led a cross-program initiative on Democracy at Risk. She is a member of the Advisory Council of the American Ditchley Foundation, a David Rockefeller Fellow of the Trilateral Commission, and a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations