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Reuters published a bombshell story a few days ago which not many have seen or will see. Sodium Haze came across it this morning. It is extraordinary, yet it fits the pattern of U.S. behaviour perfectly and contains allegations that the US ran a secret anti-vax campaign to undermine and discredit China’s Covid-19 vaccines and assistance to other nations.
The campaign targeted audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East using fake social media accounts to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims, all while the virus was killing tens of thousands daily. A key strategy pushed the (disputed) idea that as vaccines (sometimes) contain pork gelatin, that China’s shots breached Islamic law.
This military programme was operated under both Trump and Biden, with Biden’s incoming team initially team ignoring warnings that the Pentagon had been trafficking in Covid-19 misinformation.
The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals. Reuters quote a senior (unnamed) source within the Department of Defense who acknowledged the existence of the operation. The operation was opposed by at least six senior State Department officials. “We’re stooping lower than the Chinese and we should not be doing that,” said one.
The Philippines Department of Health said the “findings by Reuters deserve to be investigated and heard by the appropriate authorities of the involved countries”.
Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine, remarked: “I’m extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the US government would do that.”
John Moore, a virologist at Cornell University’s Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, told Newsweek that all of the leading nations (U.S., China, Russia) making vaccines in 2020/21 engaged in ‘vaccine diplomacy’ in an attempt “to potentially win favor in client nations”.
Academic research has shown that skepticism toward a single vaccine stokes doubts about others. In Pakistan, the CIA used a fake hepatitis vaccination program to camouflage hunting for Osama bin Laden: discovery of the ruse undermined an unrelated polio vaccination campaign and led to a reemergence of the disease.
“It should have been in our interest to get as much vaccine in people’s arms as possible,” said Greg Treverton, former chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council. “What the Pentagon did crosses a line.”
In the wake of the U.S. propaganda efforts, then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte threatened to imprison those who refused vaccinations.
In a televised address Duterte said in June 2021 “You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed…there is a crisis in this country … I’m just exasperated by Filipinos not heeding the government.” By the time Duterte spoke, Covid-19 cases exceeded 1.3 million, and 24,000 had already died. The difficulty in vaccinating the population contributed to the worst death rate in the region.
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Esperanza Cabral, a former Filipino health secretary said she had been unaware of the U.S. military’s secret operation and that “I’m sure that there are lots of people who died from Covid-19 who did not need to die from Covid-19,” she said.
This quote from a senior military officer involved in the program sums it all up perfectly. “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” he said . “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”
<sigh>
The depth of cynicism, the hubristic and aloof sense of entitlement in the way that the U.S. meddles in the affairs of other nations, their contempt for international law, the callous disregard towards human life…can be seen so often in the post WW2 decades but most recently in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, Venezuela, Ukraine and of course Palestine. Here we see it yet again.
This anti-vax disinformation operation most likely killed thousands and risked millions: not in self-defence, not even to secure a military target, but simply to push a PR gambit in the hope that it might damage China.
After all we have seen in Gaza and countless other places, if you still inexplicably believe that the U.S. and NATO are the good guys then let these revelations sink another nail into the coffin of your delusions. The Western empire over which the U.S dominates is a sprawling and supremely dangerous military alliance: an oft evil empire that is no position to point fingers of moral condemnation at Russia, China or anyone else.
This is not to say that Russia or China are any better, for this is what all powerful empires do. This is what happens when limitless power has no accountability, for power corrupts and total power corrupts totally.
I have no answers as to what to do about the monstrous agglomerations of wealth and military might that rule over our lives, but I do know that we must tell the truth about all of them and not imagine that any of them can somehow be sanctified and elevated one above another.
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