US Wages Covert Anti-vaccine Propaganda Campaign

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The US military waged a covert social media campaign at the height of the pandemic to smear the Chinese Covid vaccine, Reuters reported yesterday. 

 

The Pentagon’s campaign to disparage the Chinese vaccine ran between the spring of 2020 and mid-2021, focusing on the Philippines before spreading to other parts of Asia and the Middle East. They relied on fake social media accounts impersonating Filipino users to disseminate claims that China’s Sinovac vaccine, as well test kits and face masks produced by the country, was of poor quality. Sinovac, which began being rolled out in March 2021, became the first jab available to the Philippines during the pandemic. 

 

“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” a typical post as part of the campaign, which centered on the #ChinaAngVirus (Tagalog for "China is the virus") slogan, read, according to Reuters. Another commonly encountered post claimed: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real”. 

 

Furthermore, the Pentagon tried to convey to Muslim users in Asia and the Middle East that due to the fact that vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s jab should be forbidden under Islamic law, the report read. 

 

Reuters said that their investigation found at least 300 accounts on Twitter, which had since been re-branded as X, that matched the descriptions provided by the former US military officials who told journalists about the campaign. 

 

The news agency said that they had contacted X about the accounts and that the Elon Musk-owned platform had determined – based on activity patterns and internal data – that the profiles in question were part of a coordinated bot campaign. The accounts have been deleted, they added. 

 

The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in Covid misinformation.

 

A senior US Defense Department official confirmed to Reuters that a clandestine social media campaign against Sinovac did take place, but declined to reveal further details. Spokespeople for Trump and Biden did not respond to requests for comment about the undercover program.

 

Meanwhile, the Chinese Foreign Ministry stressed in an e-mailed response that Beijing has long maintained that the US government manipulate social media and spread disinformation.

 

Academic research published recently has shown that, when individuals develop skepticism toward a single vaccine, those doubts often lead to uncertainty about other inoculations. 

 

Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine and other health experts say they saw such a scenario play out in Pakistan, where the Central Intelligence Agency used a fake hepatitis vaccination program in Abbottabad as cover to hunt for Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. Discovery of the ruse led to a backlash against an unrelated polio vaccination campaign, including attacks on healthcare workers, contributing to the reemergence of the deadly disease in the country. 

 

Now, you know!