US military admits ‘missteps’ for anti-vax propaganda
Aug 5, 2024
US operations exploiting foreign vaccine programmes have time and again caused untold damage to the public health of countries targeted.
Speaking at a hearing late last month as head of the foreign relations committee in the Philippines, Senator Imee Marcos was running out of adjectives to describe a clandestine disinformation campaign by the US Department of Defence (DoD) to sow doubts about China’s Covid-19 vaccines in her country and elsewhere at the height of the global pandemic.
The US government-sanctioned propaganda campaign, conducted mostly on social media, was “evil, wicked, dangerous, unethical”, said the sister of the Philippine president, as she asked whether Manila had any legal recourse.
Considering the Marcos family has long been an ally of Washington from the time of their late dictator father, Imee Marcos’ angry words meant something.
Her criticism came shortly after the Pentagon not only did not deny the Reuters expose, but stood by the decision made under former US defence chief Mark Esper.
“[DoD] conducts a wide range of operations, including operations in the information environment (OIE), to counter adversary malign influence”, a department spokeswoman said in a written statement.
“This process is deliberate, methodical, and comprehensive … The DoD uses a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks.”
The Pentagon, apparently, doesn’t consider its own disinformation campaigns targeting other states as “malign influence attacks”.
Last week, though, Harry Roque, an ex-spokesman for former president Rodrigo Duterte, leaked a subsequent Pentagon communication to the Marcos government behind closed doors.
It appears the Pentagon had backtracked a bit from its public statement. It was no apology or mea culpa, of course. Rather, it acknowledged what it called “missteps”.
The US document, verified by Reuters, said the DoD “made some missteps in our Covid-related messaging”, but assured the Philippines that the US military “has vastly improved oversight and accountability of information operations” since 2022.
It said the campaign was “misaligned with our priorities” and that it “ceased Covid-related messaging related to Covid-19 origins and Covid-19 vaccines in August 2021”.
As part of an overall information warfare against China, the anti-vaccine operation was carried out in 2020 and 2021, targeting not only audiences in the Philippines but also Muslim-majority countries in Central Asia and the Middle East.
Among anti-China claims spread from hundreds of compromised social media accounts was that the Chinese-made Sinovac vaccine contained pork gelatin, the use of which is prohibited in Islam. Other claims included it being unsafe or ineffective, despite having been approved by the World Health Organisation.
There is no way to gauge how persuasive the US disinformation campaign was with its target audiences, and correlation is not causation. Also, a bungled dengue vaccine campaign introduced in the Philippines in 2016 contributed greatly to vaccine scepticism among the local population.
However, what we do know is that the launch of the propaganda campaign coincided with the pandemic’s first winter surge in late 2020 and it continued into the summer of 2021.
The Duterte government initially set the goal of fully vaccinating 70 million out of a population of 114 million. But by June 2021, only 2.1 million had been inoculated.
Most Covid-related deaths in the country occurred between April and October 2021, amounting to nearly 70 per cent of its total pandemic death toll. In total, the country is estimated to have suffered about 320,000 cumulative pandemic excess deaths.
Under President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr, Manila has taken a much more hostile stance – with full US encouragement – against China, a U-turn from his more Beijing-friendly predecessor Duterte, whose presidency coincided with the US disinformation operation.
The current Marcos government has been relatively low-key in its response to the American vaccine shenanigans, despite Imee Marcos’ fiery denunciation last month.
This is not the first time the US has exploited vaccines to conduct intelligence or military operations.
A fake door-to-door hepatitis B vaccination programme was used by the CIA to collect intelligence leading to the successful assassination of Osama bin Laden by US special forces in 2011 in Pakistan.
The operation caused a violent backlash against vaccines and other health professionals working in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Global health experts have long pointed out that such US operations seriously undermine the public health of affected populations, as well as the safety of health professionals already operating under challenging circumstances with often sceptical and uncooperative patients.
America loves to claim malign influence operations, often with flimsy evidence, carried out by foreign states against itself and its allies. It should look in the mirror.
Republished from South China Morning Post, July 29, 2024
Alex Lo has been a Post columnist since 2012, covering major issues affecting Hong Kong and the rest of China. A journalist for 25 years, he has worked for various publications in Hong Kong and Toronto as a news reporter and editor. He has also lectured in journalism at the University of Hong Kong.
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