@GossiTheDog the US Empire has a long history of using healthcare and health workers to infiltrate and cause direct harm to targeted communities.
They pretended to vaccinate for flu in Pakistan, and instead of doing that they instead just stole genetic info to supposedly track bin Laden, despite that not being at all how genetic tracking works.
You can't tell if somebody is near by based on the genetic information of a person you know is in an area.

Not to mention Tuskegee, Puerto Rico, etc.

@mousefriend You can tell if bin Laden is there if you get bin Laden's DNA. I thought that's what they did. Or possibly find a concentration of Arabic people.

The plan was actually to try to find his descendants from living there a few years?

@GossiTheDog

@clacke @GossiTheDog @mousefriend That is what they were trying to do.

@drwho I blame myself for trying to interpret things charitably* when I should have known better.

* charitably in terms of "did they actually have a plan that might plausibly work" not in terms of "is it at all defensible to abuse humanitarian aid for military operative objectives"

@mousefriend @GossiTheDog

@clacke @GossiTheDog @mousefriend I seem to recall that there was some evidence that it did help.
@clacke @GossiTheDog They did wide spread collection of genetic data across the population. Their on paper justification was to find bin Laden, but that would only work if he himself had been given the fake vaccine. The actual purpose will only be known when those classified documents become public, but it was probably nothing more complex than a way for the US to collect the genetic data of thousands of people for any future tracing needs. All of those people are now forever in a database.