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Excerpt from www.commondreams.org
‘Truly Shameful’: Pentagon Ran Secret Anti-Vax Campaign Against China at Height of Covid Pandemic
A Reuters investigation published Friday revealed that the Pentagon ran a “clandestine operation” aimed at discrediting China’s coronavirus vaccines and treatments, a campaign that U.S. public health experts and others condemned as a cynical ploy that endangered lives for political purposes.
According to Reuters, the Pentagon’s secretive campaign was designed to counter what the U.S. “perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines,” a country that was ravaged by Covid-19. The virus, which killed millions of people globally, was first detected in Wuhan, China in late 2019.
The campaign reportedly began in the spring of 2020 and was terminated in the middle of 2021 after it had expanded beyond Southeast Asia to Central Asia and the Middle East. U.S. officials involved in the effort worked “to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other lifesaving aid that was being supplied by China” using “phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos,” Reuters found.
“Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits, and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines—China’s Sinovac inoculation,” the news agency added. “Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus—Tagalog for China is the virus.”
