The US military manipulated social media and spread misinformation in order to undermine China during the covid pandemic.

Acording to a report by Reuters, the Pentagon created hundreds of fake social media profiles to convince Filipinos that China’s Sinovac jab was “fake”.

The report claims that the US military admitted that it ran a clandestine campaign aimed at discrediting the Sinovac vaccine in the Philippines and across Asia and the Middle East,

“It is true that the [Department of Defense] did message Philippines audiences questioning the safety and efficacy of Sinovac,” Pentagon officials wrote to their Filipino counterparts in a letter dated June 25.

Wonder what other misinformation were they spreading during the scamdemic?

RT reports: According to the document, the Pentagon admitted that it “made some missteps in our COVID related messaging” but assured Manilla that it halted the operation in late 2021 and has since “vastly improved oversight and accountability of information operations.” 

COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” read a typical post created by the psyops team, while another stated: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”

Military officials involved in the campaign knew that their goal was not to protect Filipinos from an unsafe vaccine, but to “drag China through the mud,” a senior officer told Reuters.

The propaganda campaign soon spread beyond the Philippines, according to the report. Muslim audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East were told that Sinovac contained pork gelatin, and was therefore “haram,” or forbidden under Islamic law. The campaign forced Sinovac to release a statement insisting that the shot was “manufactured free of porcine materials.”

The Pentagon has not publicly acknowledged the letter to the Filipino military, and the governments of the US and the Philippines refused to comment on the matter to Reuters.

Last month, however, a Pentagon spokesperson told the news agency that the US military “uses a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the US, allies, and partners,” and claimed that Washington was only responding to a Chinese “disinformation campaign to falsely blame the US for the spread of Covid-19.”

The operation in question began in 2020, after China announced it would distribute Sinovac shots in the Philippines free of charge. In an effort to counter this public relations boon for Beijing, the Pentagon ordered its psychological operations center in Florida to create at least 300 fake social media profiles to disparage the Chinese vaccine, a Reuters investigation revealed last month.