The U.S. military ran a secret anti-vaccination campaign at the height of the pandemic in the Philippines and other nations to sow doubt about COVID vaccines made by China, according to a new investigation by Reuters. The clandestine Pentagon campaign, which began in 2020 under Donald Trump and continued into mid-2021 after Joe Biden took office, relied on fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to target local populations in Southeast Asia and beyond. The campaign also aimed to discredit masks and test kits made in China. “Within the Pentagon, within Washington, there was this fear that they were going to lose the Philippines” to Chinese influence, says Joel Schectman, one of the Reuters reporters who broke the story. Schectman says that while it’s impossible to measure the impact of the propaganda effort, it came at a time when the Chinese-made Sinovac shot was the only one available in the Philippines, making distrust of the vaccine “incredibly harmful.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

A new investigation by Reuters has revealed the U.S. military ran a secret anti-vaccination campaign at the height of the pandemic in the Philippines and other nations in an effort to sow doubt about COVID vaccines made by China. The clandestine Pentagon campaign began in 2020 under Donald Trump and continued into mid-2021 after President Biden took office. The Pentagon set up numerous fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to target audiences in the Philippines, Central Asia and the Middle East. The campaign also aimed to discredit masks and test kits made in China.

According to Reuters, the secret operation was launched to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines and other countries. One senior military officer involved in the campaign told Reuters, “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective. We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud,” they said.

For more, we’re joined by the reporter who broke the story. Joel Schectman is an award-winning investigative journalist who’s written for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal on national security, intelligence and cyber espionage. His recent Reuters piece is headlined “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic,” joining us now from Washington, D,C.

Joel, thanks so much for being with us. Lay out your major findings. I mean, this is just explosive, what you have discovered.

JOEL SCHECTMAN: So, basically, what we found was that when COVID-19 broke out in January, February 2020, obviously, the entire world was not prepared for what was going to happen next. But in certain areas of the national security establishment in Washington, immediately they saw this through the kind of prism of this kind of new cold war with China, right? And the issue is that that had already been heating up. And there’s this idea in Washington now that China and Russia have been just very successful with these kind of information operations, these kind of propaganda campaigns, of the type that the U.S. used to also do a lot during the Cold War. But there’s this idea that Russia and China had really gotten ahead of the United States in the years since the Cold War. And, you know, in 2016, you have the hacking and leaking during the election to affect the outcome of the election. And there’s this idea that China has really been, like, getting ahead in that........

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