US geopolitical manipulation condemned: Campaign aiming to discredit Chinese vaccines treats lives as ‘mere pawns’

Department of Research, Strategic Studies and International Relations 27-09-2024

By PRIME SARMIENTO in Manila

The secret US military propaganda operation that aimed to discredit China’s vaccines in the Philippines normalized the “disposability of Global South lives” at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and has exposed how the US treats developing countries as “mere pawns” in a geopolitical power play, analysts say.

The US military orchestrated a social media campaign to sow distrust against vaccines and other medical items, including face masks and test kits, from China, according to a June report by Reuters. The clandestine campaign, which was staged at the height of the pandemic, mainly targeted the Philippines, the Middle East and Central Asia.

At least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, were created in 2020 and promoted the #Chinaangvirus hashtag, which means “China is the virus” in the Filipino language. Reuters said that after it asked X about the accounts, the platform removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

Last month, China Daily scanned X to look for posts with the hashtag #Chinaangvirus and still found about 10 posts, which were created in 2020.

Philippine Senator Imee Marcos, who chairs the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations, conducted an inquiry on June 25 to investigate the anti-Chinese vaccine propaganda, noting this “gravely threatens “national security issues and public health.

At the Philippine House of Representatives, Party-list Representatives Arlene Brosas, France Castro and Raoul Manuel filed a resolution seeking an investigation into the US military’s secret campaign. Manuel told local media that this disinformation campaign shows the US military views Filipinos as “mere pawns” in their agenda to counter China, which they consider a “competitor as a global superpower”.

Nuurrianti Jalli, an assistant professor at the School of Media and Strategic Communications at Oklahoma State University, said she had seen photos of social media posts included in the Reuters report, with all having a “consistent narrative”.

“The posts consistently push for anti-Chinese and anti-vaccine narratives using similar language …almost the same theme and were created almost at the same time. That’s the giveaway,” she told China Daily.

Nuurrianti, who has researched mis/disinformation and propaganda in Southeast Asia, said the Pentagon-led disinformation campaign was done at the expense of the public.

“Why would you go and create this campaign (against) Filipinos who have not done anything wrong at all?” she said, adding that the Philippines and the rest of Southeast Asia are “just pawns … because our region is a strategic region for them (the United States)”.

“Looking at this as a Southeast Asian, I feel like it’s an insult as well,” she said.

In a commentary published on the website Tech Policy Press, Jonathan Corpus Ong, inaugural director of the Global Technology for Social Justice Lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, wrote that people in the Global South have always been used as “political pawns in peak moments of geopolitical conflict”.

Policymakers and researchers should be more indignant about the Reuters report and organize better to hold both the US military and social media platforms accountable for “normalizing the disposability of Global South lives during the pandemic”, he said.

“The campaigns stoked ethnic and racial divisions within the targeted countries and provoke social animosity,” he told China Daily.

Ong, who has extensively researched dis/misinformation in the Philippines, said: “Hateful speech and expression flow and travel in our online spaces. Just as then-US president Donald Trump amplified racist ‘China Virus’ rhetoric in his speeches, Sinophobic behaviors including anti-Asian hate crimes and online hate increased globally.”

The Reuters report did not get much traction in the Philippines because “there are huge power inequalities at play here”, he said.

“Politicians and journalists in targeted countries would be wary of upsetting and calling out a military superpower they had previously engaged with as an ally. Crucially, many journalists, researchers and civil society organizations have been historically positioned as being ‘obliged to be grateful’ to the US government for their foreign aid.

“The Reuters report indicated the campaigns lasted 18 months …We are only scratching the surface here by focusing on one topic of the campaign when clearly this is an international campaign that is meant to advance US geopolitical interests at the cost of human lives during a global tragedy,” he said.

The Philippines started its COVID-19 immunization program on March 1, 2021, after it received Sinovac vaccines donated by the Chinese government.

The US Defense Department did not deny the Reuters report. In an interview with Russia’s TASS news agency, Pentagon spokeswoman Lisa Lawrence said the department conducts a wide range of operations, including operations in the information environment, to counter adversary malign influence.

Several state and non-state actors use social media platforms and other media “to spread disinformation and conduct malign influence campaigns” against the US, she said.

In line with the US National Defense Strategy, Lawrence said the Pentagon “continues to build integrated deterrence against critical challenges to US national security”.

Philippine Undersecretary of the Health Department Maria Rosario Singh-Vergeire told the June 25 Philippine Senate hearing that the department was aware of social media posts that smeared Chinese vaccines and even conducted town hall meetings to better inform Filipinos about vaccination. She said they were not aware that these posts were part of an organized campaign, noting “we thought it was just random”.

Health officials were worried about these posts “because we were trying to have all our population vaccinated, so we really needed to intensify our efforts”, Singh-Vergeire said. The department requested social media platforms to take down these posts and “some of the posts were actually taken down”, she said.