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Here is a Reuters article titled "Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic".
The article claims that the DoD (under both Trump and Biden) ran a social media disinformation campaign with the goal of convincing people in the Philippines not to take the Chinese COVID vaccine. Per the article, further countries were targeted, with screenshots in Cyrillic and Arabic stating that the Chinese vaccine contained pork gelatin and was thus haram for Muslims.
The article does not provide any independently verifiable conclusive proof for their claims, relying on unnamed DoD sources instead. Personally, I am somewhat convinces (p=0.9) that the key claims in the article are mostly correct. (Minor errors and exaggerations are always possible, perhaps one of the screenshot messages is not actually from a DoD bot.) From browsing other Reuters investigative reports, I get the feeling that they are woke, pro-Ukraine and pro-Palestinians and focusing on US-China relations and atrocities in Africa.
This leaves the morality of such actions.
I am not a fan of social media disinformation campaigns at the best of times. Burning epistemic commons to influence policy seems net-negative. However, I am also enough of a realist to see that a gentlemen's agreement not to use disinformation is well out of reach. So if the DoD is using disinformation to help this or that Philippine president getting elected (or Russia does the same for the US), that is sad by not particularly infuriating.
This is different. When that campaign happened, there was no offer by Western countries to provide Western vaccines on the same scale, time scale and costs as Sinovac. It was either Sinovac or COVID. The medical consensus seems to be that Sinovac is somewhat effective at preventing bad outcomes from COVID. Spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about available vaccines will predictably result in people dying from COVID. Just because your victims are hidden behind a veil of statistics that does not make them any less real. It is fitting that it was the DoD which ran that campaign, because accepting innocent deaths is kind of their dayjob. Morally, their decisions were not different from bombing Manila.
While all armies sometimes kill innocents, a key parameter for judging the morality of such killings is to compare the military effect of an operation to the civilian costs. If this social media campaign was a masterplan to turn mainland China into a liberal democracy, then one might notice that a few ten thousand dead civilians might be a price worth paying.
Of course, it was no such thing. From the article, this is what happened:
So China made Duterte an offer which the West could or would not make at that time, Duterte paid the price in geopolitical concessions, and then the US retaliated by trying to make the payment he got for it less effective. This does not sound like a reasonable geopolitical strategy, but like the petty behavior of a five-year-old.
Most wars are not fought with a "any victory, no matter how small, for any price" frame. For reference, the US is not even in a shooting war with the PRC, just some trade war and saber rattling. Killing civilians of a former ally to punish them for defecting seems incredibly evil.
In general, I would like to see a norm that health services are sacrosanct in conflicts. The Geneva Conventions already forbid marking combat troops with the Red Cross or Red Crescent as well as the use of pathogens in war. By analogy, countries should also not use vaccination programs to hide their spy operations (at least Shakeel Afridi got his just desserts, 33 years in Pakistani prison) or attack medical infrastructure through either computer attacks or disinformation.
My wife's relatives who are elderly were in Mexico at that time and they got Chinese vaccine.
It probably was less effective than Pfizer/Moderna but not much less because all covid vaccines are quite weak. The comparisons cannot always be trusted due to the way how such data was collected or time of vaccination. For example, Sinovac was given earlier we noticed that protection fades sooner than for vaccines that were given later.
Ok, I accept argument that this is a cold war with China and in war innocents get killed too. It is just a question where do you draw the line?
On the other hand, if Pentagon has targeted the attack in some other area instead of medicine, maybe it would be even more successful. I think the impact of criticising Sinovac was very small or even negative.
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I agreed with the general thrust of your post, but I note that you're essentially taking it for granted that the DoD ran these campaigns, the campaigns were effective in persuading many Filipinos not to take Sinovac, and many Filipinos died needlessly as a result.
Data point 1: the Philippines reported negative excess mortality during the pandemic. It also reported fewer Covid deaths than many of its neighbours per capita.
Figures above are from Worldometers.
Data point 2: by March 2023, 79.2 million Filipinos were fully vaccinated, or about 70% of the country. This is about on par with the global average, and higher than several of its neighbours including Thailand and Indonesia (but lower than Malaysia and Vietnam).
One could certainly argue that the DoD are morally implicated by these social media campaigns. If you took actions which you fully intended/expected to result in thousands of needless deaths, the fact that your actions didn't have the desired outcome does nothing to exculpate you (as I recently argued, in the rather different context of Hamas launching rockets at Israel which miss or are shot down). But it seems worthwhile to recognise that even if the DoD undertook certain actions with malicious intent, these actions were ineffective at their apparent goals.
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Yes it was. Covid was not worth the effort spent worrying about it. If anything, this is just evidence that the pentagon knew it, and by extension the rest of the deep state did. Getting vaccinated, not vaccinated, whatever. It doesn't matter. Honestly the covid response was the best evidence I've ever seen for some global council of evil type conspiracy, it was just so transparently contradicted by available data in the near-universal response.
No, I will not get angry over like two octogenarians who died a month ahead of schedule in a nursing home in a third world country. Instead I will remain angry that the entire world's health authorities actively and intentionally lied to the public to stage mass shutdowns. This is lie number nine thousand.
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Another question that bears mentioning is "how high did it go and who knew?" Reuters claims it was out of a central psyops DoD facility and diplomats objected, so it wasn't some wild minor group who got carried away, which was my initial thought. In fact, I'd draw a line directly to Trump, who apparently green-lit other anti-China psyops earlier in 2019. Not to say he directly approved it, but there was a mind-set in the intel community that he encouraged. Furthered by decisions made by Trump's chosen SecDef. The Reuters piece claims it was a sort of originally a tit-for-tat response against China spreading insinuations via their own psyops that the US was to blame for the virus, the Fort Derrick theory. Plus a little uneasiness at China earning some diplomatic wins in the region. Which checks out as expected. And in fact, diplomatic objections, the article claims, normally would have torpedoes such an effort (!), but apparently this kind of regional power struggle was put into the "military" realm, and essentially leaders decided that info-war was okay. Classic organizational behavior and pitfalls. It probably didn't help that the anti-vax effort was lumped in together with the more understandable "it actually was a Chinese virus, not a US one" message. I think then one takeaway is that putting things under a military umbrella makes the military treat it like a military conflict. Something to be very careful about!
Along these same lines, clearly the actual information about the program did not reach the very top immediately either. Apparently the social media companies found out, complained, and when Biden became president, it eventually got internally reviewed and shut down, and this only took a few months. I don't think Presidents normally get briefed about this kind of low-level effort, there are too many of them. Looking more broadly, psyops of various kinds clearly continue as the article makes clear.
I guess a second takeaway here is that messages from the top filter downstream in predictable yet often also unexpected ways. It's almost impressive how the system actually does seem to reflect in small but important ways these messages from the top, truth be told. Like, the dictat was "hey China's been messing with us and people's minds and it's time to give them a taste of it right back" and sure enough, a lot of efforts on that note spring up semi-organically. The psyops and many of these lower-level creations have clearly been militarized and the boundaries aren't very well controlled from the top, which is worrying.
There's also a somewhat unresolved question of how much the US just does what others are already doing, and how much of it is escalation on the part of the US. And obviously, let's step back: is it worth it? I don't really think a lot of the mil-ind-govt complex is doing a good enough job thinking through these things. I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is unexpected or deliberate evil on the government's part, clearly their motivations at least mostly make sense, but certainly some evil things can happen. Think Thucydides trap kind of stuff. That's why I think we view this in the lens of organizational behavior. It's also worth noting that we found out about this only 3-4 years later. That's actually a positive point to the US system -- we often find out about the bad things we do, and that allows us (at least in theory) to debate them and see if we want to be better (or not). Internally even, clearly some people found this effort highly distasteful, and eventually the internal apparatus even agreed. In many governments and systems, this might never come to light, internally or externally. For example, China does this kind of thing probably fairly often. Do the Chinese people find out about what their own government is doing? Almost certainly not. And as an aside, I count this as a minor piece of evidence that the Biden administration is much more trustable when it comes to being thoughtful about foreign policy than the Trump admin.
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I want to focus on this particular bit at some additional length - the potential for blowback here is so obvious that it's hard to imagine it wasn't discussed. I don't mean blowback in the form of retaliation (which is also possible), but in harming your own country's public health both contemporaneously and in the future. There are, surely, quite a few Americans and American residents that speak Filipino or have friends and family from the Philippines that they talk with. Targeted misinformation to sow distrust in vaccines isn't somehow firewalled to the Philippines or contained strictly to Sinovac, it's the kind of thing that spreads through the general zeitgeist, giving people the general impression that vaccines aren't so trustworthy as they once were. This will include your own citizens, citizens of allies, and will continue to shift global opinions in that direction in the future. If you're someone that thinks it might be good for public health organizations to promote vaccination during future pandemics, telling a bunch of people that vaccines don't work is a very bad idea!
This is part of the trust-shredding apparatus that governments all over the world used throughout 2020, pushing campaigns that they knew were lies at the time and somehow believing that people will just kind of forget that happened or something. For many bureaucrats, it appears impossible to even imagine a world where they can burn through so much trust for institutions that their short run lies will turn out to be a net negative. While one could object that the Department of Defense is different because of its offensive nature (which is pretty funny), but the obvious reality is that this won't matter to the people that noticed the American government lying again, which should provide some incentive for the civilian leadership to keep their dogs on a leash. I am, of course, not optimistic about people that aren't part of the "intelligence community" being able to stop it from doing whatever hare-brained schemes some idiot with an axe to grind came up with though.
I put more in my comment above, but to me this actually reinforces how important who we elect as a President is. The government actually did a wonderful job echoing Trump's own tone, and even came up with programs on their own along those same lines. While the President might not have direct control over everything, clearly messages actually do trickle down into the bureaucracy. Even unintended effects of the message. Whether you find this hopeful or depressing might be a matter of opinion and what you think of the massive civil servant bureaucracy in the first place (i.e. how responsive do we want the normal apparatus to be)
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Part of the reason why you didn't hear so much about the negative around the Sinovac is because 'misinformation' is smuggling in the conclusion that criticisms / doubts about the sinovac were, well, disinformation.
The Chinese vaccine did not work. Saying that the 'medical consensus seems to be that Sinovac is somewhat effective at preventing bad outcomes from COVID' is more than a reach given that 'bad outcomes from COVID' includes, well, having COVID as a disruptive medical experience. Sinovac failed on the grounds of what it was aimed to be by the Chinese government at the time, marketed as in the donor propaganda that came with the Chinese donations, and what the Chinese government pressed recipient governments to claim after the fact. Sinovac was not provided on the grounds that it would mitigate the worst bad outcomes from COVID- it was marketed as a vaccine to prevent COVID, on the basis of Chinese generosity and accomplishment.
There's reasons that the Sinovac vaccines largely faded from PRC media publicity campaigns in the international relations spectrum.
Is there evidence as to the extent to which it didn't work at preventing severe outcomes as opposed to infection?
Last I heard (pre-Omicron) it was somewhat worse (but not useless) compared to mRNA vaxxes on infection/transmission -- maybe competitive with the adenovirus ones? But now that it's pivoted to "we never said the RNA vaccines prevented infection sweaty -- we were always just trying to STOP PEOPLE FROM DYING" I'm not sure I trust the bare assertion that the Chinese vaccine was particularly more useless than the Western ones.
AFAIK it did provoke some amount of antibody production -- which is the only mechanism I can imagine by which Pfizer etc. were "working"?
This seems particularly uncharitable. There was a decent amount of evidence that the vaccines suppressed spread of the original COVID variants, and became less effective as the virus mutated away from the vaccine strain. I'm unsure whether the updated vaccines can again suppress spread.
I could as well write a post about people saying 'we never ACTUALLY meant the vaccines would make you sterile dumbass' or 'we didn't mean you would LITERALLY drop dead from the mRNA vaccines causing blood clots' or a litany of other claims that are clearly absurd given the billions of doses given.
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It's probably true that Sinovac didn't work. It's probably also true that the DoD neither knew that nor cared when they did this campaign, though.
I'd gamble that the government probably did know at some point, but the campaign allegedly started in mid-2020, so it's very likely to be true that they didn't know for sure (or had at best a low confidence level) that Sinovac would turn out to be kinda lack-luster at that point in time, though probably still better than no vaccine I think was at least conceptually clear, if not very strongly.
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Except, of course, that bombing Manila doesn't come with the benefit of un-bombing another city.
Whatever you think of its effectiveness, the Chinese vaccines were not as much a shortage product as all the others, and all their issues aside- issues which you are brushing aside- with any such shortages there is a zero-sum trade off where someone not taking the Chinese vaccines meant someone else could. If you want to say the Americans are responsible for ending lives in this context, you also need to give them credit for saving lives that otherwise wouldn't have been saved because- again- the usage of any limited item is zero-sum. You'd even need to address the consumption calculus, as FUD is naturally countered by the FND (fear/necessity/desperation) of the people who do need the vaccine, and are willing to overcome FUD-doubts, and the implications this has for more effective distribution of any vaccine to those who need it.
There's a lot of points one would take with your framing which I'm generally not interested in pursuing as rabit holes that don't necessarily challenge your end-post preference, starting with how framing it as a disinformation campaign is assuming a conclusion, but just the framing of the ethical implications is off, and that's without addressing the other point of information of any information activity, the receptiveness / agency of the target audience.
I can see the point you are making: if vaccines are in short supply, then it does not matter who is taking them.
As an intuition pump, consider the trolley problem with one person on each track 1 and 2. The train would go to track one, but the operator has some petty personal reason to redirect the train to track two. Perhaps he has just cleaned the ground around track one and does not want to start over from the beginning.
I have some sympathy for almost every decision a trolley operator could make for selfless reasons -- the religious person who does not act lest he kills someone through his actions, the utilitarian who estimates QALYs, the art connoisseur who sacrifices a kid to save a great artist. But the man who decides who should die based on "track two was scheduled for a hosing anyhow" is a monster.
Of course, it is not even true that discouraging people in the Philippines from taking vaccines is utility neutral. For one thing, vaccines are physical things with limited shelf lives. Distributing them throughout the country is already a challenge. Sending surplus vaccines backwards through the distribution pathway is not realistic. Of course, one could set up the distribution in such a way that the amount of vaccines which are left over is minimized, but it is not reasonable to assume that such efforts were taken. It seems more likely that the health officials were vastly overestimating the vaccine enthusiasm.
The other thing is that not all countries are equal. Given that the vaccine originated from China, it is likely that mainland Chinese ended up being the benefactors of the DoD intervention. Mainland China followed a zero-COVID policy until December 2022. If the DoD-induced unpopularity of the vaccine abroad caused Chinese citizens to be vaccinated a few months earlier, the amount of lives that saved might have been fairly minimal.
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