In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US military has launched a covert campaign to counter what it sees as China's growing influence in the Philippines, which has been hit particularly hard by the deadly virus.
The goal of the secret operation, which has not been reported so far, was to sow doubt about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and other medical products from China, according to a Reuters investigation. Through fake internet accounts, military propaganda efforts turned into an anti-vaxxer campaign. In posts on social networks, masks, covid tests and the first vaccine available to the Philippines - the Chinese "nephew" - were criticized.
Reuters has identified at least 300 accounts on Network X, formerly Twitter, that match descriptions given to the agency by former US officials briefed on the operation in the Philippines. All were created in the summer of 2020.
"Covid came from China and the vaccine is also from China, don't trust China," read one of the typical tweets from July 2020.
After Reuters referred questions to X Network about these accounts, the company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign. The US military's anti-vaxxer campaign began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before ending in mid-2021, according to the British agency.
To tailor the campaign to local populations across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake accounts on multiple social media platforms to spread fear of Chinese vaccines at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people on a daily basis. A key part of the strategy was to emphasize the contentious claim that because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, Chinese vaccines should be banned under Islamic law.
This military program, according to Reuters, began under former President Donald Trump and continued months after Joe Biden took office — even after social media executives explicitly warned the new administration that the Pentagon was involved in spreading disinformation about covid.
In the spring of 2021, the Biden White House announced a decree prohibiting anti-vaxxer efforts, which included disparaging the vaccine of competing manufacturers, and an internal audit was launched at the Pentagon.
The US military is generally prohibited from using propaganda to target Americans, and Reuters found no evidence that the Pentagon's operation violated that ban. However, a senior Defense Department official has admitted that the military has been conducting a covert campaign to discredit Chinese vaccines in developing countries.
A spokeswoman for the Pentagon said that the US military "uses a variety of platforms, including social networks, to counter malign influences against the US, its allies and partners." She also pointed out that China started a "disinformation campaign to falsely accuse the US of spreading Covid-19".
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated in an email that it has been claiming for a long time that the US government is manipulating social networks and spreading misinformation.
A spokesman for the Philippines' Ministry of Health said that "the revelations of Reuters should be investigated and the competent authorities of the countries to which they relate should be informed."
Some Philippine health professionals and former officials contacted by Reuters were shocked by the US anti-vaccination efforts, which they said took advantage of an already vulnerable population.
“Why did you do this while people were dying? We were desperate," said Dr. Nina Castillo-Carandang, a former adviser to the World Health Organization and the Philippine government during the pandemic. "We don't have our own capacity to produce vaccines," she noted, adding that the American propaganda effort "added salt to the wound."
Following the American propaganda campaign, then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte was so dismayed that large numbers of Filipinos refused to be vaccinated that he threatened arrests. "Choose: the vaccine or I will arrest you," Duterte said in a televised address in June 2021. "There is a crisis in the country... I'm just desperate that Filipinos are not listening to the government."
Certain American public health experts have condemned the program, saying that in this way citizens are put at risk for potential geopolitical gain.
"I think it's indefensible," said Daniel Lucy, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine. "I am extremely upset, disappointed and outraged to hear that the US government would do such a thing," said Lucy, a former Army medic who participated in the response to the 2001 anthrax attacks.
Efforts to stoke fear about Chinese vaccines risked undermining overall public confidence in government health initiatives, including U.S.-made vaccines that became available later, Lucy and other medical professionals said. Although the Chinese vaccines were less effective than the American vaccines of the companies Pfizer and Moderna, they were all approved by the WHO, reminds Reuters.
Recently published academic research has shown that when individuals develop skepticism about a vaccine, that skepticism often spills over to other vaccines. Lucy and other health experts said such a scenario played out in Pakistan, where the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used a fake hepatitis vaccination program in Abbottabad to cover up the hunt for Osama bin Laden. After this became known, there was a public backlash against a separate polio vaccination campaign, including attacks on health workers, resulting in the re-emergence of the deadly disease in that country.
"It should be in our interest to vaccinate as many people as possible," said Greg Treverton, former chairman of the US National Intelligence Council, which coordinates the analysis and strategies of numerous spy agencies in Washington. In this case, the Pentagon "crossed the red line," said Treverton.
Covert psychological operations are among the most sensitive programs and are known to only a small number of people within the US intelligence and military agencies. Such programs are treated with particular caution because their disclosure could damage alliances or escalate conflicts with rivals.
In order to carry out the anti-vaccination campaign, the Department of Defense ignored the objections of top US diplomats in Southeast Asia, according to Reuters. Sources involved in the planning and execution of the campaign claim that the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military's psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, ignored the collateral effects such propaganda could have on innocent citizens.
American military leaders feared that China's covid diplomacy and propaganda would bring Beijing and other Southeast Asian states, such as Cambodia and Malaysia, closer to Beijing and fuel its regional ambitions.
"We didn't look at this from a public health perspective," said a senior military official who participated in the program. "We were looking for ways to smear China."
In May 2020, Chinese leader Xi Jinping said that the vaccine that China is developing will be available "as a global public good" and that it will take care of the "affordability and availability of vaccination in developing countries". "Sinovak" was the primary vaccine available in the Philippines for about a year, until early 2022, American vaccines did not become widely available.
Washington's vaccination plan favored immunizing Americans first, and placed no limits on the prices pharmaceutical companies could charge developing countries for leftover vaccines not used in the US. That allowed companies to "play hardball" with developing countries, forcing them to accept high prices, said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of medicine at Georgetown University who has worked with the WHO. "The US has taken a decisive approach to America first," said Gostin.
"We didn't share vaccines very well with partners," a senior US military officer directly involved in the campaign in Southeast Asia told Reuters. "So the only thing left for us is to cast a shadow over China's efforts."
Bonus video:
