The U.S. Department of Defense conducted a covert campaign during the coronavirus outbreak to raise doubts about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and other life-saving aids supplied by China, according to an investigative report by Reuters news agency on June 14.
One senior military officer involved in the propaganda efforts was quoted in the bombshell Reuters saying: “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective. We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”
The Pentagon’s aim with the operation was to limit China’s influence in the Philippines and other countries during the epidemic, according to the news outlet’s analysis.
During the pandemic in Hungary, there were numerous articles criticizing Chinese vaccines in the press, which were financed by foreign actors, primarily from the United States. However, there is currently no evidence these articles were directly connected to the Pentagon’s efforts.
Notably, Hungary was the first country in the EU to approve the Chinese-made Sinopharm vaccine, which was created using traditional vaccine methods instead of the mRNA technology seen in vaccine products such as Pfizer.
The report reveals that the Pentagon, in the context of a secret campaign launched in 2020 and then stopped in mid-2021, used fake X (formerly Twitter) accounts and generated fake news to negatively portray the effectiveness of masks, test kits and Sinopharm vaccines from China.
Despite U.S. officials complaining about disinformation being produced around vaccines during the height of the Covid-19 crisis, the Pentagon was busy at work discrediting Chinese and Russian vaccines.
The U.S. military operated hundreds of troll accounts and online bots that attacked Chinese vaccines using outright lies, including in Tagalog and other languages. Among the claims made by these U.S. bots were that the vaccines were “rat poison” and a part of a plot for China to take over the Philippines. There were also claims that the vaccines contained pork gelatin, which would be a major issue for the island nation’s Muslim population. The campaign was coordinated around the racist hashtag #ChinaAngVirus, which means “China is the virus.”
The background to the operation was that while the U.S. was still focused on vaccinating its own citizens, China started donating vaccines to countries in need, increasing its soft-power influence, which Washington viewed as a negative development.
In the course of the propaganda operation, members of the U.S. Armed Forces spread messages like “Covid is from China, the vaccine is from China, don’t trust China!” on social media. Interestingly, in the fact-finding compilation from Reuters, the participants in the U.S. program also acknowledged the operation was in fact real.
In Hungary, during the coronavirus epidemic, left-wing and liberal parties and their associated press organs conducted an extensive campaign aimed at Chinese and Russian vaccines. Many of these outlets are outright funded by the United States.
In January 2021, Ferenc Gyurcsány’s leftist Democratic Coalition party launched a petition to stop vaccination in Hungary with a Chinese vaccine that was not authorized by the European Medicines Agency, while András Fekete-Győr, former chairman of Momentum, demanded that members of the government vaccinate themselves with the Chinese vaccine first.
Notably, world health authorities later backed the Chinese vaccines. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) has certified both the Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines and added them to the list of vaccines for Covid-19, after health trials satisfied the safety and efficacy of the vaccines in question.
