The U.S. Defense Department admitted it spread propaganda in the Philippines aimed at disparaging China’s Sinovac vaccine during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a June 25 document cited by a former top government official earlier this month.
The U.S. response to the Philippines was recounted in a podcast by Harry Roque, who served as spokesman for former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Reuters subsequently reviewed the document, which hasn’t been publicly released by either government. The news agency was able to verify its contents with a source familiar with the U.S. response.
“It is true that the (Department of Defense) did message Philippines audiences questioning the safety and efficacy of Sinovac,” according to the document, which references information sent from the U.S. Defense Department to the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs and Department of National Defense. According to the document, the Pentagon also conceded it had “made some missteps in our COVID-related messaging” but assured the Philippines that the military “has vastly improved oversight and accountability of information operations” since 2022.
The U.S. admission followed a June 14 Reuters investigation that revealed how the Pentagon launched a secret psychological operation to discredit Chinese vaccines and other COVID-19 aid in 2020 and 2021, at the height of the pandemic.
Through phony internet accounts with tens of thousands of followers meant to impersonate Filipinos, social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and China's Sinovac shot. As a result of the Reuters investigation, the Philippine Senate Foreign Relations Committee launched a hearing into the matter and sought a response from the U.S.
According to the June 25 document, Pentagon officials concluded its anti-vax campaign was “misaligned with our priorities.” It says the U.S. military told Filipino officials that operatives “ceased COVID-related messaging related to COVID-19 origins and COVID-19 vaccines in August 2021.”
The Philippines’ defense and foreign affairs departments did not respond to requests for comment about the U.S. military’s admission that it ran the propaganda program. Department of Defense spokesperson Pete Nguyen declined to confirm the U.S. response cited in the document. But he acknowledged the Pentagon did distribute “social media content about the safety and efficacy of Sinovac.”
At the time the Pentagon launched its campaign, national security officials in Washington worried that China was exploiting the pandemic to negotiate important geopolitical deals and undermine U.S. alliances internationally by sending aid to the Philippines and other nations.
The clandestine psychological operation uncovered by Reuters wasn’t limited to the Philippines. It also targeted developing countries across Central Asia, the Middle East and Southeast Asia in 2020 and 2021. The Philippines and those other nations were, at the time, heavily reliant on China’s Sinvoac to inoculate their populations against the deadly virus. --->READ MORE HERE
| The Washington Post |
Gone are the days of scrubbing surfaces, sudden school closures, and social distancing.
Where a positive COVID-19 test once wrought panicked contract tracing and guaranteed two weeks of isolation, these days, a diagnosis sparks relatively little worry for most people.
Even amid a summer spike in cases — everyone from President Joe Biden to the 2024 Summer Olympians seems to be battling the virus — the general public's attitude toward the pandemic that upended our lives more than four years ago is more relaxed than ever.
The federal public health emergency for COVID expired in May 2023, officially ending the crisis, at least in name, more than three years after it was first declared. Since then, thanks to high infection and immunization rates, the country has continued climbing toward the herd immunity doctors so desperately sought in the early days of the pandemic, four medical professionals told Business Insider.
"The risk perception and anxiety around acute COVID infection has definitely lessened," said Dr. Anita Chopra, an internist at the University of Washington medical system. "People are interacting and mingling more like in pre-pandemic times."
Healthcare professionals told BI that the public's more relaxed attitude toward COVID is ultimately a good thing. A return to normality was the goal, after all.
But COVID is still very present and very much a potential threat, especially for the immunocompromised and those unlucky enough to develop long COVID symptoms — up to 10% of patients, according to some doctor estimates. Meanwhile, relaxed masking and declining vaccination rates, while to be expected at this point, could be linked to the rising case numbers doctors are seeing in clinics around the country, medical professionals told BI.
"We need to acknowledge that we're in a very different place now than we were at the height of the pandemic," said Dr. Eric Chow, chief of communicable disease epidemiology and immunizations at Public Health Seattle and King County. "But so long as COVID-19 continues to circulate, there are health implications to getting infected."
Evolving behaviors and beliefs
Many of the early-day pandemic precautions have all but disappeared in 2024. Chief among them, according to doctors, are masking, isolations, and vaccinations.
Soon after the pandemic emerged, medical professionals emphasized masking as a key way to slow the spread of the virus.
The face coverings quickly became a contentious cultural topic and among the most politicized aspects of COVID. But these days, even many who once championed masks have ditched the deterrent entirely. An August 2023 Yahoo News/YouGov poll of 1,665 US adults found that 12% of respondents said they were masking — down from 60% in January 2022. And doctors told BI that they've seen a steady decrease in masking since then. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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