by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., Childrens Health Defense:
The military’s campaign, based on the principles of psychological warfare, was operated out of “trailers and squat buildings” at the MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, according to a Reuters investigation.
The Pentagon in 2021 operated a secret propaganda campaign to disparage the Chinese-made Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine in the Philippines, a Reuters investigation revealed Friday.
The secret campaign to counter what the U.S. “perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines,” launched during the same time the U.S. government was telling Americans COVID-19 vaccines were “safe and effective” and censoring vaccine critics, alleging they were spreading “misinformation.”
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Sinovac was the first available COVID-19 vaccine in the Philippines in 2021, while vaccines from U.S. companies such as Pfizer and Moderna weren’t available until mid-2022.
Campaign ‘aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines’
According to Reuters, the campaign at first “aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid” provided by China using “phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos,” but then “morphed into an anti-vax campaign.”
The campaign began in the spring of 2020 and was not limited to the Philippines — it expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021.
“A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law,” Reuters reported.
The campaign was based on the principles of psychological warfare and was operated out of “trailers and squat buildings” at the MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.
There, “U.S. military personnel and contractors would use anonymous accounts on X, Facebook and other social media to spread what became an anti-vax message,” Reuters reported, noting that the facility remains the U.S. Department of Defense’s “clandestine propaganda factory.”
The “contractors” in question included defense contractor General Dynamics IT. Reuters accused the company of employing “sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts” created on social media platforms for the propaganda campaign.
The Reuters investigation identified at least 300 such accounts on X — formerly Twitter — almost all of which were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus, which is Tagalog for “China is the virus.”
Examples of the tweets generated by the accounts, which questioned not just the Sinovac vaccine but other COVID-19 pandemic measures, such as facemasks and the use of PPE, include:
- “COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!”
- “From China — PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”
- “Can you trust China, which tries to hide that its vaccine contains pork gelatin and distributes it in Central Asia and other Muslim countries where many people consider such a drug haram?”
The accounts had “tens of thousands of followers during the program,” Reuters reported, and came at a time when vaccine skepticism was high in the Philippines, leading the country’s then-president, Rodrigo Duterte, to threaten the unvaccinated with arrest. Duterte requested — and was granted — priority access to Sinovac.
This “anti-vax” campaign was launched by the U.S. government even as, in the U.S., the government helped fund behavioral psychology efforts — also known as “nudging” — “to increase uptake of COVID-19 vaccines and other recommended public health measures by countering mis- and disinformation.”
The U.S. government has acknowledged the existence of its Southeast Asia propaganda campaign.
“A senior Defense Department official acknowledged the U.S. military engaged in secret propaganda to disparage China’s vaccine in the developing world, but the official declined to provide details,” Reuters reported, citing a Pentagon spokeswoman who said that “a variety of platforms” were used “to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the U.S., allies, and partners.”
The spokeswoman also claimed the efforts were in response to a “disinformation campaign” China launched “to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19.”
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