Opinion | America’s Virulent Anti-Vaccine Lies
Typically, Americans learn about the clandestine depravities undertaken abroad by their government only decades after the offenses were committed. But last month, one ugly episode was revealed from the still-inflamed recent past: In a report for Reuters, Chris Bing and Joel Schectman documented that, in 2020 and 2021, the Department of Defense conducted an extensive, international disinformation campaign initially intended to discredit Chinese vaccines in the Philippines, a nominal ally, and later among Muslim-majority countries in Central Asia.
According to Reuters, at the very height of the coronavirus pandemic, with the disease raging through its first winter surge, American intelligence agents were actively spreading lies via social media to disparage vaccines being developed by China, presumably to suppress uptake. When the Pentagon was confronted with the report, its spokeswoman didn’t just acknowledge the existence of these sorts of programs; she appeared to defend them.
The Reuters report is very much worth reading in full, a showcase of American recklessness in what may already be a new age of Spy vs. Spy psyops. Over the past few years, Americans trying to make sense of the country’s political fractiousness have been fed a steady diet of scare stories about malevolent meddling by foreign intelligence services — most of them about Russia but some about China as well. But we’ve had very little reporting, or reckoning, with what the American side of that information war might look like. In fact, we’ve probably heard more complaints that the U.S. government has been doing too much to block the flow of disinformation, foreign or otherwise, than we’ve gotten accounting of any American information offensives — or how fully certain corners of the military have already embraced the anything-goes logic of a Cold War 2.0.
On this point, the Department of Defense was remarkably blunt, acknowledging flatly in its statement about the anti-vaccine campaign that the Pentagon “conducts a wide range of operations, including operations in the information environment (O.I.E.), to counter adversary malign influence”; that “this process is deliberate, methodical and comprehensive”; and that this work employs “a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks.” The Chinese have been, predictably, more hyperbolic: An editorial in the Chinese Communist Party-run Global Times called the social media campaign simply “brainwashing.”
The program is reported to have begun almost as soon as the pandemic itself, in the spring of 2020, inspired at least in part by Chinese efforts to pin the outbreak on a visit to China by an American serviceman, to suggest the disease originated in an American laboratory at Fort Detrick, and more generally to flood social media with suggestions that the United States was behind the novel disease. (These efforts didn’t get much traction outside China.) In response, newly created social media accounts that appear to have been operated by the U.S. military asserted that Covid was a purposeful bioweapon; the posts often included a hashtag, in Tagalog, that translates as “China is the virus.”
At least six State Department officials objected, Reuters reports; the campaign proceeded anyway, consistent with a 2019 order by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper that elevated America’s rivalry with China and Russia to the priority of active combat and allowed the Pentagon to undertake such operations against those countries without State Department approval. By the summer, the propaganda campaign seemed to have moved beyond the origin of the disease to the vaccines developed to protect against it, inflaming anxieties among Muslims that the Sinovac shots from China had been manufactured with pork products prohibited by Islamic law. Quite quickly, Reuters reports, Facebook flagged the accounts as objectionable, but the Pentagon defended them as parts of a legitimate counterterrorism operation, and the accounts remained active through the spring of 2021, when President Biden ordered the operation suspended.
