Reuters: Pentagon spread fake news about Chinese coronavirus vaccine

The Pentagon spread fake news about Chinese coronavirus vaccines to discourage developing countries from buying them, a Reuters investigation has found.

The US has asked the Philippines to forgive it for conducting a secret campaign to discredit China's Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine, calling it “oversight”. This is reported by Reuters. US military “launched a covert program to discredit China's Sinovac vaccine.” Among the targets were Filipino citizens, said former U.S. military officials familiar with the matter and a Pentagon source.

Through fake online accounts posing as Filipinos, the US military waged a campaign against the first vaccine to arrive on 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, nearly all of which were created in the summer of 2020 and were spreading the hashtag #Chinaangvirus (“China is a virus”). After the agency contacted the former Twitter, its administration investigated the matter and confirmed that it could have been an orchestrated smear campaign. All of these accounts have now been deleted. They had tens of thousands of followers.

“The military program began under former President Donald Trump and continued for several months into Joe Biden's presidency,” – Reuters writes. Social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon was spreading COVID misinformation, but the US presidential administration did not respond, apparently being aware. At the same time, the military's 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 how to drag 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 arrest for this.

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