Pentagon not denying secret campaign to discredit Chinese vaccines

The US Defence Department did not deny a report accusing the Pentagon of orchestrating a secret campaign meant to discredit Chinese Covid-19 vaccines, and suggested that the move was an attempt to counter "malign influence campaigns" run by Beijing.

The department said on Sunday, in response to a query about a Reuters report that the Pentagon tried to discredit the quality of Chinese face masks, test kits and the country's Sinovac vaccine, that it conducts "a wide range of operations, including operations in the information environment (OIE), to counter adversary malign influence".

The report said the campaign to discredit the Chinese vaccine began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, several months into the administration of US President Joe Biden.

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It was within that time frame that Chinese officials suggested in social media posts and press conferences that Fort Detrick, a US Army facility that had a biological weapons programme from the 1940s through 1960s, should be investigated as a potential source of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19.

The latest development on this front underscores how far Washington and Beijing were, and still are, from cooperation on efforts to end the pandemic that had by that point killed more than 4 million people worldwide.

A man is inoculated with China's Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine in Quezon City, Philippines in 2021. Photo: AP alt=A man is inoculated with China's Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine in Quezon City, Philippines in 2021. Photo: AP>

One White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said staff "were still trying to chase down" the report's details to confirm them. The State Department referred the Post's query to the Pentagon.

Sinovac, whose vaccine was the first Covid-19 jab to become available in the Philippines, reacted quickly to the report, calling the Pentagon campaign a "wrong attack that will create enormous disaster".

The Defence Department "uses a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter ... malign influence attacks aimed at the US, allies and partners", said Lisa Lawrence, a Pentagon spokesperson. "As it relates to Covid-19 disinformation, China [in 2020] initiated a disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of Covid-19."

"In line with the US National Defense Strategy, the [Defence Department] continues to build integrated deterrence against critical challenges to US national security, including deterring [China's] spread of disinformation under the scrutiny of the Department's coordination and deconfliction process," she added.

James Mattis, who served as defence secretary under US President Joe Biden's immediate predecessor, Donald Trump, released his National Defence Strategy in January 2018.

That document references China's "influence operations" as part of Beijing's efforts to displace the US military from the Indo-Pacific region.

"China is leveraging military modernisation, influence operations, and predatory economics to coerce neighbouring countries to reorder the Indo-Pacific region to their advantage," it said.

"As China continues its economic and military ascendance, asserting power through an all-of-nation long-term strategy, it will continue to pursue a military modernisation programme that seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global pre-eminence in the future," it added.

Disinformation is also mentioned in the National Defence Strategy released by Biden's Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin in 2022. The term shows up under the heading of "competitors' grey zone activities", applied only to Russia explicitly and without any specifics on how such activity would be countered.

That section said that China "employs state-controlled forces, cyber and space operations, and economic coercion against the United States and its allies and partners".

Russia, meanwhile, "employs disinformation, cyber, and space operations against the United State and our allies and partners, and irregular proxy forces in multiple countries", it said.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2024. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.