Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic

&gt; payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic<p>Maybe it is wrong but I did not read much about China blaming US for pandemic outside couple of articles claiming that on US media (including this one) while a lot American media, politicians and ordinary people used to blame China for pandemic since the beginning. I think this is just trying to justify this campaign as a reaction mechanism by the author while he admitted that it had put lives in risk and probably was indirectly cause of death for some. And the rest of article is good.

Not the first time either. The US covert use of fake vaccination drives to gather intel to assassinate Bin Laden caused the public to become distrustful of vaccinations and led to the resurgence of Polio in that region.

Shame and fucked up, although everyone is doing it. The Canadian government is currently having a big kerfuffle about foreign influence (1) and seems like the USA conveniently blames all domestic political strife on such interference. The obvious ethics of this aside, it&#x27;s a good reminder that anything geopolitical is an active propaganda war these days. I notice it less on HN but honestly can&#x27;t even read Reddit anymore there days because of this re: other current events.<p>1 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbc.ca&#x2F;news&#x2F;politics&#x2F;foreign-interference-trudeau-nsicop-1.7222730" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbc.ca&#x2F;news&#x2F;politics&#x2F;foreign-interference-trudea...</a>

In a long list of awful things that US intelligence agencies have done, this has got to be near the top.<p>Also, what happened subsequently is a textbook example of what Chalmers Johnson described in &quot;Blowback&quot;.

This got innocent people killed. In a just world, those responsible would be in prison, but instead they just got another $0.5bn contract.

That’s pretty straight up evil

Real story IMO is at least further confirmation that Facebook, despite &quot;expressing anger&quot; are wholly subsumed by the national security state and allowed, or was not able to put a stop to this campaign until NSC chose to stopped the disinformation campaign because it aligned with new admins interest. Meta not only let obviously inorganic US propaganda to continue, but gave pentagon heads up that the campaign was too obvious, implying they can coordinate to enhance US disinformation dissemination, if subject&#x2F;purpose wasn&#x27;t something FB culture found distasteful. Not that it matters, since article suggest DoD can just ram through disinfo campaign on FB and presumably other western platforms with relative impunity.

&gt; The U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda, and Reuters found no evidence the Pentagon’s influence operation did so.<p>The US military should be banned from using propaganda in any form. We&#x27;re not in a war. There&#x27;s no justifiable reason to spend US tax payer dollars to actively lie to the rest of the world.<p>What a shameful and tawdry use of our institutions.

&gt; Facebook executives had first approached the Pentagon in the summer of 2020, warning the military that Facebook workers had easily identified the military’s phony accounts, according to three former U.S. officials and another person familiar with the matter. The government, Facebook argued, was violating Facebook’s policies by operating the bogus accounts and by spreading COVID misinformation.<p>&gt; The military argued that many of its fake accounts were being used for counterterrorism and asked Facebook not to take down the content<p>There you have it. Counter-terorrism is our new &quot;please think of the children&quot; to halt logical thought and make you the bad guy if you continue pressing any further on serious matters.

It wasn&#x27;t just against China, they were campaigning against all non-western vaccines. Either you get Phizer&#x2F;Astra-Zenka, or that evil Chinese&#x2F;Russian&#x2F;whatever liquid will make your eyes bleed out.<p>It&#x27;s not even a &quot;secret&quot;, you can just read &quot;Radio Free Europe&quot;: the messaging was absolutely obvious.

&gt; The U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda, and Reuters found no evidence the Pentagon’s influence operation did so.<p>This is a moronic caveat. They were posting on instagram, facebook, and twitter. I have it on good word that Americans read those. I suppose that they&#x27;ll be able to post any sort of lie as long as they say they were targeting Turkmenistan or Bolivia.

&quot;And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign – General Dynamics IT – won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military.&quot;<p>So basically this campaign was just one of many?!

What makes this infuriating is the &quot;most moral country in the world&quot; did this for economic damage to another country&#x27;s commercial market. So much for free markets. In the US, we still think the China vaccines are not as effective. This led to Saudi Arabia requiring everyone who came for pilgrimages to use US made vaccines. The problem was US made vaccines were not readily available in all places. It was double trouble for them.<p>I am so angry right now.

Only three-four years lifetime for a conspiracy theory?!<p>They don&#x27;t make them like they used to...

The misinformation is coming from inside the house!

The campaign specifically targeted Sinovac. US military assets may have been used, but I&#x27;ll bet Pfizer and Moderna had a hand in this, seeing how embedded they are in the media and parts of the USG.