DAILY TRIFECTA: When The Pentagon Went Full Anti-Vaxxer

Geopolitical games people play

NOTE: This long, detailed “bombshell” from Reuters (the lead story in FOREIGN ENTANGLEMENTS on today’s RUNDOWN) is both shocking and not surprising. Of course the US engages in the same type of online psyops that it accuses Russia, China and Iran of conducting. In this case, the Philippines was the primary target and the piece implies that their COVID death rate may have been stoked by Pentagon’s anti-vax efforts. It’s also no surprise that a leading defense contractor—General Dynamics—worked on the program and, as Reuters noted, it “won a $493 million contract” in February “to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military.” That little nugget appears at the end of the piece and it is well-worth reading all the way through to that all-too logical conclusion.

TITLE: Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/

EXCERPTS: At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

Reuters 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 – Tagalog for China is the virus.

After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.

The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review, Reuters found.

The U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda, and Reuters found no evidence the Pentagon’s influence operation did so.

Spokespeople for Trump and Biden did not respond to requests for comment about the clandestine program.

A senior Defense Department official acknowledged the U.S. military engaged in secret propaganda to disparage China’s vaccine in the developing world, but the official declined to provide details.

A Pentagon spokeswoman said the U.S. military “uses a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the U.S., allies, and partners.” She also noted that China had started a “disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19.”

In an email, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it has long maintained the U.S. government manipulates social media and spreads misinformation.

TITLE: Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaigns during Covid pandemic, whistleblowers reveal
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13530299/Pentagon-secret-covid-vaccine-China-pandemic.html

EXCERPT: The campaign also reinforced what one former health secretary called an already longstanding suspicion of China.

Filipinos were unwilling to trust China's Sinovac, which first became available in the country in March 2021, said Esperanza Cabral, who served as health secretary under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

'I'm sure that there are lots of people who died from Covid who did not need to die from Covid,' she said.

To implement the anti-vax campaign, the DoD overrode strong objections from top US diplomats. Sources involved in its planning and execution told Reuters the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military's psychological warfare operations center in Florida, disregarded the impact the propaganda could have had.

Psychological warfare has played a role in US military operations for more than a hundred years, although it has changed in style and substance over time. 

'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.'

TITLE: U.S. Military Ran Hundreds of Anti-China Twitter Accounts Spreading Anti-Vax Propaganda: Report
https://gizmodo.com/pentagon-china-antivax-twitter-instagram-covid-19-1851540402

EXCERPT: Social media has made it much easier for nation-state actors to spread disinformation, but the U.S. government was distributing propaganda in foreign countries long before Twitter and Facebook were invented. The U.S. government spent years running articles under fake bylines in newspapers around the world in the 1950s and ‘60s.

The U.S. Information Agency (USIA), America’s foreign propaganda arm during the Cold War, would write articles under names like Guy Sims Finch to advance U.S. business interests. Gizmodo filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the CIA about the campaign in 2016 but was denied on the grounds that we couldn’t provide names of the real people who wrote under that name, a condition to supposedly ensure the privacy rights of those government agents were respected.

The CIA infamously used a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign in Pakistan after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, that was actually a cover to conduct DNA testing in a secret campaign to find Osama bin Laden. That campaign caused a backlash against all vaccinations in the region, harming public health in immeasurable ways for generations to come.

More recently, the U.S. has been exposed to running social media campaigns in Cuba to sow anger at the Communist government, even launching its own version of Twitter. Those efforts were first launched in 2010 and 2013 under President Barack Obama.