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 last 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 began 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.
All told, the operation does not appear to have been terribly large, to trust this initial reporting: Reuters identified around 300 accounts, with just tens of thousands of followers. But you can’t measure the malevolence of covert ops by their efficacy, given how many fail or backfire. And, whatever the scale, the nature of an anti-vaccine disinformation operation is grotesque, given the timing of its rollout and the stakes of vaccine hesitancy. At first, the report reveals, the program was focused on the Philippines, but it was not limited by the nation’s borders, with operatives reportedly tailoring anti-vaccine messaging for populations across Central Asia and the Middle East, as well. Reuters did not document anti-vaccine activity directed at China, but it would not be surprising to learn of parallel efforts there.
This was a period, remember, when the federal government was at least collaborating with American social media companies, and perhaps pressuring them, to police vaccine disinformation and remove any questionable content before it might suppress domestic vaccine uptake. At the same time, it turns out, the Pentagon was apparently engineering and exporting that very same kind of disinformation abroad.
In 2011, as part of its effort to track down Osama bin Laden, the C.I.A. staged a phony door-to-door hepatitis B vaccination campaign — a manipulative effort that quickly led the Taliban to issue a fatwa against vaccination programs and produced such significant diplomatic blowback that the C.I.A. later promised to never deploy similar tactics again. In denouncing the Pentagon for the Covid-era program, Alex Tabarrok, an economist who advised the government on pandemic policy, declared that “U.S. intelligence agencies should be banned from interfering with or using public health as a front.” But what is most distressing about the anti-vaccine campaign was that effects on public health weren’t just collateral damage — damage to the public health was the weapon of influence. However it began, the Reuters report reveals that sowing doubt about vaccines quickly became the very purpose of the campaign — damaging public health, through the depths of a pandemic, by design. This is quite a perverse inversion of “vaccine diplomacy” — rather than promoting global health as a way of cementing soft power, American operatives ostensibly calculated that damage to global health was a small collateral price to pay for a bank-shot strike against the status of a geopolitical adversary.
The precise death toll of such an operation is hard to measure, not just because the program itself seems to have been relatively small but also because the drivers of vaccine hesitancy are always — as in the United States — complex and hard to parse. A Dengue vaccine introduced to the Philippines in 2016 contributed to lingering public skepticism there, according to Reuters, and widespread suspicion about the regional influence and strategic motivations of China presumably also lowered Filipino confidence in the Sinovac shots (and therefore vaccine uptake more generally).
But while hesitancy was not a unique challenge in the Philippines, vaccine uptake there was lethally slow. The government established a goal to fully vaccinate 70 million of its 114 million people by the end of 2021. By that June, only 2.1 million people had gotten the shots — a fraction so tiny, and a failure so enormous, that Rodrigo Duterte, then the president, took to national television in a mask to warn, “You choose: vaccine, or I will have you jailed.” Even so, in the months that followed, the country struggled to vaccinate even one-third of its citizens, at a time when vaccination rates in other parts of Southeast Asia — in Cambodia, in Malaysia — were several times higher, and even regional vaccination laggards, like Vietnam, were rapidly picking up the pace.
The results were grim. The Philippines experienced by far its largest surge of Covid deaths between April and October of 2021. This period marked a major shift for the country. The Philippines had survived the first year of Covid, when mortality rates were shaped most profoundly by mitigation measures and nonpharmaceutical interventions, quite well. In fact, according to The Economist, the Philippines finished 2020 with what is called negative excess mortality; the Covid response had been so effective that fewer Filipinos died in 2020 than would have in a normal year despite the presence of a virulent and lethal new disease. And while the death toll grew in the early months of 2021, it grew only slowly. By March 1, the total number of excess deaths recorded in the country was just over 4,000. By the end of that October, it was more than 220,000.
Today, three years later, The Economist estimates that the cumulative pandemic excess mortality in the Philippines is 320,000 deaths — meaning that nearly 70 percent of the country’s pandemic death toll came in the immediate aftermath of the American disinformation campaign. On a per-capita basis, the carnage of the period looks even worse. Early in March 2021, per-capita excess mortality in the Philippines was 3 percent of the American total — one-thirtieth of our then-horrifying per capita excess death toll. By October, it had grown past 70 percent of ours.
How much of this can be attributed to the Pentagon’s malevolence? In America, we routinely overestimate the effect of targeted “disinformation” on our politics and personal behaviors, and, quite likely, an American intelligence operation likely would have shaped the Filipino mortality pattern only on the margins. Official death rates often reveal as much about public health accounting practices as they do the footfall of the disease, and by other, generally more reliable statistical measures, the Philippines experienced a more brutal pandemic than many of its regional peers, but it also did better than some others: For instance, more people appear to have died in Cambodia and Laos, on a demography-adjusted per capita basis, but fewer did in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. These are all country-size stories, in other words, with pandemic outcomes shaped by nearly as many factors as each has citizens. The Philippines was not necessarily a major regional outlier, even though American influence nevertheless seemed to have been working to undermine its Covid response.
And to what end? The nominal target of the program was apparently not Filipinos, many of whom may have died needlessly as a consequence, or the government of the Philippines, which struggled with additional vaccine resistance in the midst of a brutal wave. It was the Chinese government and Chinese science, which would suffer in only vague and indirect ways even from the success of the program. Had more Filipinos lined up quickly for Sinovac shots, and survived the pandemic as a result, Chinese standing in the country may well have grown somewhat. But given the vagaries of national reputations — and the objections from the Department of State — this is a flimsy justification for any program that leaves an entire country more vulnerable to a still-rampaging disease. It’s also just pretty sick.
The post America’s Virulent Anti-Vaccine Lies appeared first on New York Times.
