Mike Dee 
Kevin BeaumontPentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign on social media
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/
Pontificator.OMF@GossiTheDog Oh, this can only go full-bad. Next people will be asking "If they did this, then who else did they do it to?" Next we'll be finding they did such to vaccine producers who were not US controlled.
embix@GossiTheDog What could possibly go wrong?
It only strengthened the nutjobs. 😠
It only strengthened the nutjobs. 😠
Gabriel Pettier@GossiTheDog ok, this is bad, really, but on the other hand, how are antivax conspiracy theorists going to process that information?
@tshirtman @GossiTheDog Just as they always do: cherry-picking the parts that align with their opinion and ignore the rest.
clam@GossiTheDog thanks, tax dollars /s 
Timothy Wolodzko@GossiTheDog So basically, anti-vax is a Pentagon's conspiracy to make people believe in a different conspiracy..?
enoch_exe_inc@GossiTheDog I’ve always suspected as much, though I could never prove it.
Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈@GossiTheDog The United States Of America has declared war on Global Health and millions have already died from it.
The weaponization of masks and vaccines, the obscene healthcare insurance industry, the nazis who want to control Women by taking away Abortions, IVF, etc
This is America's legacy to the world now, pain, suffering and misery.
Bad ally.
Fritz Adalis
wm.annis@GossiTheDog It's quite the thing to find my own cynicism out-done by reality nice and early in the morning.
Robbie Coleman 
@GossiTheDog
AreWeTheBaddies.jpg
AreWeTheBaddies.jpg
DoomsdaysCW
myrmepropagandist@GossiTheDog Isn’t this against the Geneva convention? not that that would stop them. :(
Theriac
Gord
IAG@GossiTheDog to be clear, this doesn't appear to have targeted Americans, at least from what I've gathered
clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛@iagondiscord Yeah, the misinformer-in-chief ran the campaign in the homeland, in full view.
CubeRootOfTrue@GossiTheDog I'm confused because they were running the same op in the US and it was no secret
Sue is Writing Solarpunk 🌞🌱That was my first impulse: wait, Trump was running an anti-vax campaign in the US targeting Americans and everyone knew it; it was the furthest thing from a secret.
Not that this isn't terrible — it is — and what exactly did you expect from the Trump administration?
The article also buries that Biden shut it down.
Naco1974@GossiTheDog fools, they are paying dearly, and will pay more
US is dooming them selves
US is dooming them selves
🌿Mouse-Friend🌿@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?
The Doctor@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"
@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.
cekI have finally read the article and can say that the headline is absolutely misleading to the point of being absolutely correct. They ran an op to indeed discredit a "vax", but not the broad idea of vaccination -- rather, a specific vaccine coming from a specific country (well, 2 in total to be precise).
Reuters journalist[s] goes to great lengths in mental gymnastics to connect different narratives [to sensationalize the article] by covering his ass with a scientific research that presumably demonstrates that skepticism towards a single vaccine spills over to broad uncertainty about the whole vax idea.
The stanza "Chinese vaccines ... less effective than the ..." is mind bending on its own as the actual numbers are 60% inactivated vs ~97% mRNA. Why is writer using word "less" instead of "CATASTROPHICALLY LOWER"? Would've fitted article tone very well.
Having said that, you really shouldn't pour shit on other vac producers while holding up [or not able to] supply of your own vac.
David Mitchell 
The comparison only matters if both were available. At the time of the campaign’s start mRNA was not yet available, and didn’t become available in PHIL for a good while after the US started using it. 60% was the only level of protection available to Filipinos, so discrediting it in any way would serve only to harm people.
@DavidM_yeg re alternatives availability, that doesn't seem to be true.
First batch (600k?) of Chinese vaccines arrived on Feb 28.
First batch of AstraZeneca (480k) arrived on March 4.
< 1 week difference.
US mil should not have shat on philis heads, but chinese should not have started crapping on US first.
That’s the biggest pile of bullshit ever.
Using Filipinos as pawns in empire games is just wrong. Full stop.
Promoting anti-science memes, damaging societies, encouraging the spread of diseases - illness, disabilty, and death - is just wrong. Full stop.
No amount of both-sidesing or global power-play relativism excuses that and the impression that that’s what you’re doing stinks.
You are amplifying the [flimsy] narrative and you continue to get sucked into it.
You've got to be very naive (or detached from reality) to believe there could be countries, governments out there existing in a void, in a vacuum, only by themselves, self-sufficient, unobstructed and uninfluenced by external forces. Modern world is cruel, if not ruthless. If there's a void, it will be filled, one way or another, whether you want it or not.
Now getting back to the second statement that's been brought up -- whether Phillis were severely damaged by the campaign in question --- we get back to numbers, and specifically the fatality rate (deaths per population). We open the stats and we see -- surprise surprise (but not for me) -- they weren't significantly affected, they have [exactly] the same numbers as Japan. Call me a racist, but they are very genetically similar, so it's safe to assume they have had the same severity of exposure and the same course of illness as the Japanese.
@cek No, that's not how this works. There is no surgical precision psy-op. You run a nonfactual campaign against a specific vaccine, you undermine the people's understanding that vaccines work. You run an anti-vaxx campaign in the Philippines, it leaks into the global zeitgeist and definitely contributes to vaccine paranoia on the other side of the planet.
The Pentagon is a threat to global health.
Sinovac was 60% effective and mRNA vaccines were 97% effective. That's a fact. The campaign said China is the virus, don't take Sinovac, when Sinovac was the only vaccine available in the region. That's murder.
We now have 2 narratives factually debunked:
* That the Campaign was discrediting the only available vaccine thus leaving populace defenseless
* That the Campaign against single vaccine severely affected fatality rate in Philippines
US mil made a mistake for sure (the existence of the article itself proves that), but the data speaks for itself.
@cek just fucking don't run misinformation campaigns against public health ok
Joseph Dickson@GossiTheDog this is why the world can't collectively come together during a 🤬 pandemic and focus on a shared problem. Sigh.
Brian Clark@GossiTheDog Worked /real/ well... 
The Great Llama 
@GossiTheDog
"A Pentagon spokeswoman said the U.S. military “uses a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the U.S., allies, and partners.” She also noted that China had started a “disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19.”
How is, "they started it," the excuse? Pro-tip Pentagon: if it's not a good enough excuse for a grade schooler, it's definitely not a good excuse for you.
Lightning Bjornsson* 
@TheGreatLlama @GossiTheDog “Malign influence attacks” I only see USG doing malign influence here
@lightning @GossiTheDog
I mean... It's an article about this specific case and doesn't cover whether China was doing anything similar.
While I certainly don't think anyone owes the fucking Pentagon the benefit of the doubt, I also think it's pretty naive to assume that digital disinformation campaigns aren't happening constantly between nations. It's just too cheap for them to pass up. Nations are a problem, not just the Western ones.
Exactly. The US didn't enter an empty media field, it was already infested with at least 2 countries running disinfo campaigns targeting English,Arab-speaking audience (I'd say, potentially affecting billions).
More than that, I believe US was actually quite late to the party.
We'll never know what was the real situation on the field, but I presume it actually was the US intervention that ultimately ended all the campaigns or prevented them from continuing past start of active worldwide vaccination (mid-'21). In spring of 2021, it's been reported at least 3 countries were engaged in disinfo campaigns related to vaccination (russia, china, iran+proxies). Now we know there's been a 4th country, the US.
But we can only speculate. Maybe this article is a campaign on its own, maybe US wants to bite (bait?) the antivaxers back for whatever current reasons it might have.
WiredBun@GossiTheDog i absolutely hate the way the US govt toys with and tortures the philipines like its the vampire attacks all over again
食 Shoku the Umbreon@GossiTheDog This is the problem with power. They had a slap fight that got billions of people caught in the middle.
@GossiTheDog Wow, just wow!