America’s anti-China psyop programs a 24/7 menace to the Philippines
Jun 19, 2024
Major Western news outlets are currently reporting how the Pentagon ran a secret anti-vaccination campaign in order to undermine China’s life-saving COVID vaccination programme in the Philippines – and beyond – from the spring of 2020 to mid-2021.
According to Reuters, this extensive, well-organised, malign project aimed: “to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of [Sinovac] vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China.” Sinovac was less high-tech than the prominent US COVID vaccines (which were high-priced and virtually unavailable at that time across the Global South) but Sinovac worked and was readily available at low (or no) cost, and it was approved by the WHO.
Did the disparaging Pentagon campaign succeed? By June, 2021, the COVID vaccination uptake in the Philippines was far lower than expected according to Reuters: “Only 2.1 million of its 114 million citizens were fully vaccinated — far short of the government’s target of 70 million.” The COVID death toll in the Philippines reflected this low vaccination rate.
Reuters noted how:
Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations centre 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.”
Moreover, the US:
[F]avoured inoculating Americans first, and it placed no restrictions on what pharmaceutical companies could charge developing countries for the remaining [hi-tech] vaccines not used by the United States.
The deal allowed the 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 World Health Organisation.
The deal “sucked most of the supply out of the global market,” Gostin said. “The United States took a very determined America First approach.”
Certain officials from the US State Department argued strongly against this psyops project saying that: “A health crisis was the wrong time to instill fear or anger through a psychological operation”. These protests were ignored by the Pentagon, however, which had the backing of the White House.
These reports narrate US conduct that is extraordinary, reprehensible and, today, distinctly predictable.
Richard Cullen is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. He was previously a Professor in the Department of Business Law and Taxation at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Contributions to Pearls and Irritations
Your contribution will fund quality independent comment and analysis in Pearls and Irritations
Contribute
