US military’s secret anti-vax campaign not surprising

Reuters recently published a bombshell report that in the spring of 2020, the US military began a social media disinformation campaign in the Philippines that aimed to undermine China’s influence in the country by casting doubt on the effectiveness of the Covid relief aid China had delivered.

Under the pithy slogan #Chinaangvirus (#ChinaIsTheVirus), these fake accounts explicitly and repeatedly doubted the effectiveness of China’s Sinovac Covid vaccine, in some cases calling the vaccine “fake.” In others, it suggested that the virus’s origin in China was all the evidence needed to be suspicious of the vaccine, whose origin was also in China.

The logic may be elusive, but the sentiment seemed to resonate. At least, the Philippines struggled mightily with vaccination uptake initially, with only about a third of the population taking up the vaccine over the first eight months of its distribution.

This wasn’t the only such campaign. From its operations hub in Tampa, Florida, the military psychological operations team reportedly expanded its horizons to the Middle East and Central Asia.

In these cases, it amplified the rumor that the Covid vaccines from both China and Russia contained pork gelatin. More than 150 Facebook and Twitter accounts repeated variations on the same message: Sinovac and Sputnik V were not halal. Do not get the vaccine.

As expected and, indeed, as appropriate, nearly everyone asked to comment on this story condemned the action, citing both the immediate deleterious effect this campaign may have had on Covid illness severity and death rates during the pandemic and its wider effect of fomenting vaccine hesitancy more broadly.

Though some expressed shock that the US would opt for such a campaign, others