The US military used fake social media accounts to spread propaganda that was designed to discredit China’s COVID-19 vaccine in the Philippines during the height of the pandemic, according to a bombshell report from Reuters. The anti-vax campaign ran from spring 2020 until mid-2021, and was intended to “counter what [the Pentagon] perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines,” the publication found in its investigation. The Philippines saw low vaccination rates through 2021 even months after China’s Sinovac vaccine arrived in the area, and recorded nearly 50,000 COVID deaths by November of that year.
In one example of the US’s anti-vax messaging cited by Reuters, an account in 2020 tweeted, “COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” The campaign also pushed the narrative that China’s vaccines were “haram” — or forbidden under Islamic law — because of a pig derivative in the in
