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A video game billed as a “‘vaccine’ against disinformation” is drawing criticism for the “inoculation” strategies it employs — and because its developers have ties to government and military entities, Big Tech and the Gates Foundation.
“Bad Vaxx,” launched last year, promises to help kids “build resilience against vaccination misinformation.”
Users can play as a pro-vaccine “hero” or an anti-vax “villain.”
Scientists who created the game said players demonstrated a greater ability to “spot manipulation techniques in social media posts,” and were less likely to share “manipulative content” on social media.
The game’s developers published their findings last year in Scientific Reports. The study concluded that the game was successful in increasing players’ “resilience to vaccine misinformation.”
Critics accused the game of intentionally reinforcing establishment vaccine narratives instead of helping players develop critical thinking skills.
“Teaching people, especially young people, what to think rather than how to think is problematic and obviously suspicious,” said Alex Pattakos, Ph.D., contributing writer to Psychology Today.
“Packaging potentially harmful information in a ‘game’ format can easily be used as a form of subliminal manipulation and censorship,” Pattakos said.
Ginger Taylor, former executive director of the Maine Center for Vaccine Choice, said “Bad Vaxx” is another attempt by the public health establishment to boost vaccine uptake at a time when a growing number of people are questioning vaccine safety or declining vaccination for themselves or their children.
“The vaccine program is dying because they will not reform it,” Taylor said. “This video game rehashes the same lies that we have been force-fed since the 1970s.”
Some critics suggested that using a video game to promote public health objectives is itself questionable, due to the potential risks they pose to child development. Zen Honeycutt, founding executive director of Moms Across America and the Moms Across America Movement, said:
“One of the most important things we can do for our children is keep cell phones and electronic devices out of their hands for as long as possible, for when they have them, Big Pharma has unmonitored direct access to our children, their brains and hearts.
“Bad Vaxx attempts to brainwash our children, rob them of their critical thinking and eventually contaminate them with potentially harmful vaccine contaminants. Having a tough conversation about rules today prevents a tragic conversation down the road.”
‘This isn’t moving the needle in the direction they want’
“Bad Vaxx” is divided into several “chapters,” each of which “represents a technique or method often used in misinformation or misleading information.” The methods are linked to a series of characters that a player can choose to play as. They include:
- Ann McDotal, who “represents the use of anecdotal evidence and emotional language” that “can be used to sway opinions despite lacking scientific evidence.”
- Dr. Forge, who “embodies the misuse of medical legitimacy” to “spread false or misleading information.”
- Ali Natural, who “symbolizes the fallacy that natural remedies are inherently better” than “scientifically developed vaccines.”
- Mystic Mac, a “conspiracy theory professional” who sows “distrust in legitimate information.”
The game incorporates several psychological techniques, including “inoculation theory.” First developed by social psychologist William J. McGuire and researcher Demetrios Papageorgis in the 1960s, the theory sought to promote techniques for “producing immunity against persuasion.”
In the 2010s, Sander van der Linden, Ph.D., a professor of social psychology at Cambridge University in the U.K., revived inoculation theory, expanding it to the realm of combating online misinformation and “conspiracy theories.”
Van der Linden, one of the researchers involved in the development of “Bad Vaxx,” connected inoculation theory to the concept of pre-bunking, or preemptive debunking.
Tech companies and public health organizations used pre-bunking during the COVID-19 pandemic to promote pro-vaccine narratives.
Documents released as part of the “Twitter Files” in 2023 showed that during the pandemic, the Virality Project, founded at Stanford University, worked with platforms like Twitter to develop pre-bunking strategies against COVID-19 “misinformation.”
According to the Virality Project, “recent misinformation research on ‘inoculation theory’” shows that “pre-bunking misleading narratives before they reach a large audience potentially offers an important tool for public health communicators.”
Taylor said gimmicks like “Bad Vaxx” that target children with pro-vaccine content are unconvincing — and unethical. She said:
“[Bad Vaxx] is a super lame ‘video game.’ It’s just the next version of the silly websites they’ve tried to make for kids over the years to do this.
“I tried playing it, and not only is it a crappy game, but it teaches the child to lie. This is a waste of money on their part, no one’s going to play it. We should point and laugh at it. No matter how many ways they find to repackage the old lies, this isn’t moving the needle in the direction they want.”
‘Bad Vaxx’ developers connected to Gates, Big Tech
According to the game’s website, Bad Vaxx was developed with funding from the U.K. Government Cabinet Office, European Union (EU) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Lab, which helped lead the development of “Bad Vaxx,” is linked to military agencies, Big Tech firms and the Gates Foundation.
The lab’s website states that the lab “explores the basic social and cognitive psychological processes underlying human social judgment, communication, and decision-making.”
This includes a focus on the “persuasion and influence process, especially how to ‘inoculate’ people against online misinformation and manipulation.”
Some of the researchers who performed their postgraduate research at the lab have received scholarships from the Gates Cambridge Scholarship Program. Part of the Gates Cambridge Trust, the program was established in 2000 with a $210 million endowment from the Gates Foundation, funding postgraduate scholarships.
Several current and former doctoral students and researchers affiliated with the Social Decision-Making Lab received these scholarships, including students involved in studies on psychological inoculation against “fake news,” “misinformation” and misinformation-related topics.
In 2022, the Gates Foundation helped fund a peer-reviewed study in the journal Science Advances on how psychological inoculation “improves resilience against misinformation on social media.” In 2020, it funded a similar paper published in the Journal of Cognition. Both papers were co-authored by van der Linden.
The 2022 paper was also partially funded by Google Jigsaw — Google’s unit that works on topics related to disinformation and manipulation. In 2022, Google Jigsaw funded a postgraduate research position at the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab for work on “developing effective interventions to counter false information.”
In 2018, WhatsApp — owned by Meta, Facebook’s parent company — gave $1 million in research grants to van der Linden and other Cambridge researchers, for work on “Game-based interventions against the spread of misinformation.”
Game’s developers tied to military-industrial complex
Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Lab has also received funding from DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — for “accuracy-nudge” studies. DARPA was implicated in mRNA research and in pandemic-related surveillance research in partnership with the Gates Foundation.
In 2022, the Rockefeller Foundation, National Science Foundation and other nonprofits developed psychological “nudging” techniques as part of the Mercury Project. The project’s goal was “to increase uptake of COVID-19 vaccines and other recommended public health measures by countering mis- and disinformation.”
“Bad Vaxx” is also connected to the military-industrial complex through Tilt, a company aiming to “boost people’s resilience against online manipulation.” Tilt helped develop “Bad Vaxx.”
Tilt works “alongside universities, NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and governments in order to maximise impact.” Partners include the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center, NATO, the U.K. Cabinet Office and the European Commission — the EU’s executive branch.
The Global Engagement Center coordinated with Stanford and other organizations to censor speech before the 2020 election. According to the “Twitter Files,” the center also worked with the Atlantic Council to draft lists of users for Twitter to censor.
The Trump administration shut down the center last year. Stanford faces a congressional investigation for allegedly helping governments censor Americans.
Tilt’s director, Gwenda Nielen, is a sociologist and behavioral researcher and former lieutenant-colonel in the Dutch Armed Forces. Her bio states that she has “expertise on disinformation, online & offline manipulation and hybrid conflict” — topics for which she has delivered presentations at EU-sponsored events.
Nielen is a senior business developer for TNO, a Dutch research group focusing on applied science in defense, safety, security, human and organizational effectiveness and societal resilience. Nielen contributes work on online manipulation to TNO.
Last year, former pharmaceutical research and development executive Sasha Latypova and retired science writer Debbie Lerman released the “Covid Dossier,” presenting evidence of the “military/intelligence coordination of the Covid biodefense response in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy.”
Latypova told The Defender that “Bad Vaxx” is “a brainwashing technique probably adapted from the military training protocols.”
“By gamification and targeting younger audiences, these methods seek to eliminate critical thinking and replace it with drilled automatic responses, and also create a psychological barrier for shunning any information that may challenge the drilled narrative,” Latypova said.
‘Bad Vaxx’ developer previously embroiled in controversy
Van der Linden — author of “Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity” and “The Psychology of Misinformation” — co-wrote an article for The Conversation last year stating that “most influential misinformation is coming from the top,” including from politicians such as U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
These figures “spread thoroughly debunked claims, such as the myth that the MMR [measles-mumps-rubella] vaccine causes autism.”
But according to investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, van der Linden is the one who “specializes in spreading misinformation,” using “fake expertise to silence debate and stir discussions in directions that favor his personal politics.”
“He once promoted a debunked article that said it was ‘racist’ to question if the COVID-19 pandemic started in a lab, which is actually what most Americans believe and where the evidence is most clear.”
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