Reuters: Pentagon conducted disinformation campaign against Chinese vaccine to undermine China's position

The Pentagon spread fakes about Chinese coronavirus vaccines to prevent developing countries from buying them, a Reuters investigation says.

US military “launched a secret program to discredit the Chinese Sinovac vaccine”. Among the targets were Filipino citizens, former US military officials familiar with the matter and a Pentagon source said.

Through fake Internet accounts, posing as Filipinos, the US military waged a campaign against the first vaccine that began to arrive in the islands – the Chinese Sinovac. Chinese masks and PCR tests were also discredited. Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X that fit the description of the campaign. Almost all of them were created in the summer of 2020 and spread the hashtag #Chinaangvirus (“China is a virus”).

After the agency contacted the former Twitter, its administration investigated the matter and confirmed that this could be a planned discredit campaign. All these accounts have now been deleted. They had tens of thousands of subscribers.

“The military program began under former President Donald Trump and continued for months into Joe Biden's presidency.” – writes Reuters. Social media executives have warned the new administration that the Pentagon is spreading misinformation about COVID. At the same time, the military psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, “ignored the collateral impact that such propaganda could have on innocent Filipinos.” “We didn't look at it from a public health perspective. We thought about dragging China into the dirt as much as possible.”said a senior military officer who participated in the program.

The agency recalls that after this campaign, many Filipinos began to refuse vaccinations, and the country's authorities were forced to threaten them with arrests for this. “They discredited their vaccine, but they didn’t want to harm China. This is some kind of oxymoron,” said political scientist Konstantin Blokhin. He believes the US has campaigned to make sure the trade war and economic sanctions against China are justified. The program was also conducted against the Russian drug in order to promote Western ones.

Vadim Kozyulin, an employee of the IAMP Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Foreign Ministry, added that in this way the United States tried to eliminate a competitor. “China has many reasons to take some measures [в ответ]. We constantly hear threats from the American military, who are preparing to fight and honestly say so,” he added. More than 300 information attacks RDIF has been recorded for the Russian Sputnik V vaccine since its registration.

The general director of the fund, Kirill Dmitriev, commented on a Reuters article about the Pentagon’s secret campaign against the Chinese Sinovac vaccine. The main thing from the statement:

• a coordinated disinformation campaign was also conducted against the Russian vaccine in order to prevent vaccination in the Russian Federation and prevent the drug from entering foreign markets;
• information attacks came through fake accounts, anonymous sources, biased experts, as well as the British intelligence services and the US Department of Health;
• the British Cyber ​​Security Center claimed that hackers associated with the Russian Federation allegedly tried to steal data on the development of a vaccine from the United States, Britain and Canada;
• British media, citing intelligence agencies, claimed that the Sputnik V formula was stolen by Russian hackers from AstraZeneca;
• The US Department of Health in its report openly admitted that it persuaded Brazil not to use Sputnik;
• to counter disinformation, the foundation organized more than 50 foreign studies and scientific publications confirming the safety of the Russian vaccine;
• According to WHO, almost 13 million people have died from COVID-19; their number “could have been significantly lower if Western countries had not used the dirtiest methods of competition.”

PS The role of the British Reuters in this matter is interesting. Apparently, the British decided to play on the contradictions between the United States and China, taking a pro-Chinese position. What this means, we will most likely find out a little later…

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