Your Tax Dollars at Work

It appears that the Department of Defense ran a secret program to spread fear uncertainty and doubt about the Sinavac Covid vaccine.

But this wasn't just an anti-Sinavac program, it was also an attempt to discourage people using things like Chinese masks, and Chinese Covid tests, and seems to have been structured to discourage people generally from engaging in remediation during the apogee of the pandemic.

This is not only stupidly hostile, it also facilitated the spread of the disease, so, to quote the movie The Hunt for Red October, "You arrogant ass, you killed us!"

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. 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.

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.

“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”

After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. 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.

Sinavac was not the most effective vaccine, it needed a series of 3 shots rather than 2 for the MRNA equivalents, but this action doubtlessly resulted in the deaths of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people for no good reason at all.

………

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.

Why the f%$# would you want to do this?

………

To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.

“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”

………

China’s growing influence fueled efforts by U.S. military leaders to launch the secret propaganda operation Reuters uncovered.

“We didn’t do a good job sharing vaccines with partners,” a senior U.S. military officer directly involved in the campaign in Southeast Asia told Reuters. “So what was left to us was to throw shade on China’s.”

"Didn't do a good job?"  More like being big pharma's bitches and refusing to allow for compulsory licensing of the vaccines.

So instead, you killed people, and made the pandemic worse everywhere, including in the United States.

In a just world, there would be an investigation with a number of general officers, most prominently Special Operations Command Pacific General Jonathan Braga, who appears to be the prime mover in this effort would be subjects of courts martial and would be separated from the service.

This is insane.