It’s taken me a little while to put virtual pen to paper in response to the appalling report from Reuters that revealed how an official US-government-sanctioned campaign set out to deliberately undermine COVID vaccination efforts in the Philippines.

Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

Reuters

The program, which apparently ran from 2020 through the end of the Trump administration and months into 2021, was a deliberate act of propaganda to undermine the influence of China on the global COVID vaccine stage (which the USA was not contributing to at all at the time). While Americans were “not targeted” by the misinformation, that specifically set out to disparage and undermine the Sinovac vaccine that was in widespread use in that region at the time, there cannot be any doubt that the lives of locals were placed at risk. As an infectious disease specialist who has dealt with antivaccine misinformation for all of their professional career, this is simply unacceptable to me. Regardless of the relative merits of one vaccine over another, or the petty machinations of the political regimes, during a global pandemic it is an abject failure of humanity to deliberately place other human beings in harm’s way.

This isn’t the first time that vaccines have been used as tactical tools – in the hunt for Bin Laden the CIA used a hepatitis vaccine program to collect DNA from children in an attempt to discover links to the terrorist in hiding. When the ruse became public, vaccine workers (even those with nothing to do with the program) were targeted and the polio eradication campaign stalled, with effects that have taken over a decade to even start to undo.

In response to the Pentagon’s efforts to undermine China, Filipino vaccine rates were woefully low, to the extent that the Government had to threaten jail for those who refused vaccination. When the US was approaching herd immunity at 65% coverage, in June 2021 the Philippines had only about 2% of their population immunized.

It takes a special kind of heartless disregard for science, and the welfare of other human beings, to promote this kind of act and go along with it. I suppose should we expect anything less, coming from a political leader who downplayed the seriousness and very existence of the problem and then politicized masking and social distancing, even as they sent protective equipment to their political allies. After vaccines became widely available, the anti-science mindset among Republicans was responsible for a 43% higher rate of excess deaths compared to Democrats in Florida and Ohio.

Arguably, deliberately undermining vaccine programs for political gain is tantamount to poisoning a water supply, which is literally a war crime. I cannot overstate how upset I am about this entire story – we as the experts have a hard enough time educating a scared and skeptical public about the measures that we are recommending to literally save them from themselves, without having our work attacked and undone by the powers that be.