The U.S. military ran a secret anti-vaccination campaign at the height of the pandemic in the Philippines and other nations to sow doubt about COVID vaccines made by China, according to a new investigation by Reuters. The clandestine Pentagon campaign, which began in 2020 under Donald Trump and continued into mid-2021 after Joe Biden took office, relied on fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to target local populations in Southeast Asia and beyond. The campaign also aimed to discredit masks and test kits made in China. “Within the Pentagon, within Washington, there was this fear that they were going to lose the Philippines” to Chinese influence, says Joel Schectman, one of the reporters who broke the story. Schectman says that while it’s impossible to measure the impact of the propaganda effort, it came at a time when the Chinese-made Sinovac shot was the only one available in the Philippines, making distrust of the vaccine “incredibly harmful.”
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