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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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