SEN. Imee Marcos on Tuesday filed a resolution urging the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to investigate the alleged anti-Chinese vaccine propaganda and misinformation supposedly launched by the US military during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In filing Senate Resolution No. 1052, Marcos said there is need to verify if the alleged campaign was orchestrated by the US military, and if true, “determine the ramifications of the actions of the US military, any potential breach of international law by the (USA) and the possible legal recourse available to the Philippines, considering that such anti-vax and misinformation campaign threatens national security.”
Marcos was referring to a report published on June 14 that the US military allegedly deliberately discredited Sinovac, an anti-COVID-19 vaccine developed by China, as a response to Beijing’s efforts to blame the United States for the pandemic.
“The anti-vax efforts by the US military was also designed to counter China’s growing influence in the Philippines and other developing countries,” Marcos said in the resolution.
According to the Reuters article, the anti-vax campaign by the US military was conducted through fake internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos. Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X (formerly Twitter), which were supposedly used for the campaign. The social media accounts were all created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan “#Chinaangvirus.”
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were also anti-vax propaganda across Central Asia and the Middle East which used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms which amplified the disputed contention that China’s vaccines contain pork gelatin and are therefore prohibited under Islamic Law,” she said.
“Based on the article, sources involved in the planning and execution of such anti-vax campaign say that ‘the Pentagon disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have had on innocent Filipinos. A senior military officer involved in the program said that ‘We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective…We are looking at how we could drag China into the mud,” she added.
In response to the report that Pentagon conducted such secret anti-vax campaign, Sinovac told a new agency in an exclusive response dated June 16, 2024, that “Stigmatizing vaccines can lead to a series of extremely serious consequences such as lowering vaccination rates, disease outbreaks and epidemics, social panic and unrest, and crises of trust in science and public health,” Marcos said.
Another news article dated June 16, 2024 disclosed that the Reuters news article triggered anger among Filipinos such as Dr. Nina Castillo-Carandang, a former adviser to the World Health Organization and the national government during the pandemic, who said that ‘We don’t have our own vaccine capacity and the US propaganda effort contributed even more salt into the wound.”
“These anti-vax and misinformation campaign gravely threaten national security and public health,” she said.
