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https://theconversation.com/us-military-launched-a-secret-anti-vax-campaign-in-the-philippines-heres-why-im-not-surprised-232639>
"
Reuters recently published the 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 rumour 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
pointed out that we’d seen this scenario before – and recently."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
