U.S. military’s misinformation campaign against Sinovac in Philippines sparks condemnation – Xinhua

Photo taken on Feb. 19, 2020 shows the Pentagon seen from an airplane over Washington D.C., the United States. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

"We weren't looking at this from a public health perspective...We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud," an officer involved in the Pentagon's misinformation campaign against Sinovac was cited by Reuters as saying.

BEIJING, June 20 (Xinhua) -- A recent Reuters investigation has found that the U.S. military launched a secret disinformation campaign to discredit Chinese vaccines in the Philippines, a nation severely impacted by COVID-19.

The disclosure has sparked widespread condemnation of the U.S. scheme from public health experts. Even former U.S. intelligence officials have decried the disinformation campaign.

China's Sinovac vaccine, the only type available in the Philippines during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, was smeared repeatedly under the Pentagon program.

Reuters reported that it identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation.

Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus, meaning China is the virus in Tagalog, a major language of the Philippines.

"We weren't looking at this from a public health perspective," a senior military officer involved in the program was cited by Reuters as saying. "We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud."

Due to the disinformation campaign, vaccination rates in the Philippines remained dismally low. In June 2021, then-Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte appealed on television to the public to get vaccinated.

At that time, only about 2.1 million out of the country's 114 million people were fully vaccinated, far below the target of 70 million for that year.

"Over 60,000 Filipinos died, and many of them would have survived if not for the disinformation campaign against the Sinovac vaccine," former Philippine presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said on his social media.

Cho-Chiong Tan, a doctor and associate professor at the Institute of Medicine, Far Eastern University, said Reuters' report "shocked the whole Philippines."

"The malign action of the United States has seriously harmed the health of the Filipino people and hampered the Philippine efforts to fight against COVID-19," Tan said, adding that distrust and panic about vaccine safety caused some people to give up vaccination, increasing the risk of contracting the virus.

"The practices of the United States not only harmed the interests of the Filipino people, but also endangered global public health and the well-being of all mankind," he added.

"I don't think it's defensible. I'm extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that," said Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine.

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U.S. military's misinformation campaign against Sinovac in Philippines sparks condemnation - Xinhua