China lashes out at US over report of Pentagon’s secret anti-vax campaign
“The facts have proven time and again that the United States has consistently spread false information through the manipulation of social media, poisoned the public opinion environment and smeared the image of other countries,” foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian told reporters in Beijing on Monday.
“China firmly opposes this.”
He said Washington should “set its mind right, shoulder its responsibilities as a great power, and stop fabricating and disseminating false information against other countries”.
Lin was responding to a media query about a Reuters investigation published on Friday that said the Pentagon had tried to discredit the quality of Chinese face masks, test kits and Chinese biopharmaceutical company Sinovac’s vaccine.
The shot was the first Covid-19 jab to become available in the Philippines, which had struggled to source vaccines during the pandemic.
Reuters said the campaign began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021 – several months into the administration of US President Joe Biden.
The report quoted a senior US military officer directly involved in the campaign in Southeast Asia as saying: “We didn’t do a good job sharing vaccines with partners. So what was left to us was to throw shade on China’s.”
Lin said the officer’s words had “exposed the truth and intentions of the US in launching a disinformation campaign against other countries”.
“If the US wants to contain and suppress a country, it will ignore the truth, and coordinate resources to discredit and slander [the country],” he said.
“Such practices don’t not reflect the strong capabilities of the US, but only reveal its hegemony and hypocrisy,” he said, calling on the international community to have a “clear understanding” of the issue.
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Inside a plant in China producing the WHO-approved Sinovac Covid-19 vaccine
Inside a plant in China producing the WHO-approved Sinovac Covid-19 vaccine
It said the department conducts “a wide range of operations, including operations in the information environment, to counter adversary malign influence”.
