On June 14, 2024, Reuters published an exposé showing that the Pentagon under both Presidents Trump and Biden ran a secret anti-vax campaign across Asia in order to sow doubt about China’s Sinovac vaccination. The majority of their efforts were put into the Philippines, a crucial U.S. ally in the South China Sea. The propaganda campaign also included central Asian countries like Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
The overall goal of the scheme was to sow distrust in China and the pandemic-related aid the Chinese government was giving to countries in the region, and to get citizens in these countries to refuse to take the Sinovac vaccine.
In the Philippines the campaign was largely successful. The Pentagon orchestrated a massive army of bots and users online who acted like they were Filipinos. They posted the hashtag #ChinaAngVirus which is Tagalog for #ChinaisTheVirus, along with disinformation like tweets and infographics stoking anti-Chinese sentiments and propagating the conspiracy theory that Sinovac had pig gelatin in it to discourage Muslims from using it.
The campaign resulted in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people in the region. In the Philippines alone many thousands more died than would have if they had taken the vaccine. When Sinovac became available the goal was to have 70 million people vaccinated, but during the campaign only 2.1 million Filipinos got the vaccine.
Large tech companies like Meta and Twitter discovered the Pentagon was conducting these disinformation campaigns, but when they told the government that it was violating their policies, the government asked them to keep the content up, and they did! Only when the bot and disinformation accounts were reported by journalists did these tech firms take the accounts down.
During the height of the pandemic, the U.S. government was desperate to counter China’s global response to the crisis. China at the time, in order to curry favor with countries in the region, began giving out pandemic aid like masks and vaccines. And the strategy of doing so was working, as many countries, including the Philippines, were warming up to the Chinese diplomacy. The U.S. government in response decided to counter this aid by scaring the people of these countries into not taking it. And in turn, not only are many Filipinos scared of taking the Sinovac vaccine, but all COVID-related vaccines. This in turn caused even more people to die unnecessarily from Covid.
This is horrific. It’s disgusting to see in a global crisis how the U.S. government uses its money and resources. They create doubt about a life-saving vaccine in order to maintain their power in the region. In so many different ways, we see how the workers of the world are pawns in the game for world domination played by the rich and powerful and their nation-states.
It’s important to point out that the United States government is the real aggressor here, but even the Chinese government is playing the same game of capitalist domination, just a little differently. At the end of the day, the capitalist countries of the world like the U.S. and China are hell-bent on expanding their power and access to important trade routes, key manufacturing technologies, and cheap resources and labor. They will use any methods possible, whether disinformation or carrot-and-stick diplomacy to get there. But these aggressions by the U.S. government are just one example of how the ruling class in this country is preparing to fight a bigger war against the Chinese ruling class to maintain its domination over the world.
We can’t afford to continue to be their collateral damage. And as long as we live under the system of capitalism, we will continue to suffer these kinds of attacks.
