I dont think people realize how much money the US spends on Official anti-china propaganda. over a BILLION. do you know how much that is? Do you have any idea how many people you can pay for that? How many news articles you can buy? How many hoaxes? How many reporters you can keep on retainer? How many analysts you can pay to drum up fake statistics? How many studies you can fund? How much social media you can manipulate?
Not a lot of people know this but during the height of COVID the USA funded anti-vaccination conspiracy theories in the Philippines in an attempt to undermine the PRC's influence, using hundreds of (confirmed) bot accounts (potentially far far more), rallying under the tag #Chinaangvirus ("China Is The Virus"). While initially the program primarily drummed up claims of the virus being China's fault, it ended up going far beyond that into making claims about vaccines provided by the PRC being unsafe, in particular leveraging concerns of religious minorities against China.
Hardly any outlets reported on this at all
The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. 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
By the summer, the propaganda campaign seemed to have moved beyond the origin of the disease to the vaccines developed to protect against it, inflaming anxieties among Muslims that the Sinovac shots from China had been manufactured with pork products prohibited by Islamic law. Quite quickly, Reuters reports, Facebook flagged the accounts as objectionable, but the Pentagon defended them as parts of a legitimate counterterrorism operation, and the accounts remained active through the spring of 2021
NYT
So So many people died because of this, and its had a lasting impact on the culture and attitudes towards vaccines in affected communities. Its not even the first time the U.S. has propped up these kinds of anti-scientific conspiracy theories in other countries for their own political goals, either
read more:
The intersection of public health and International Relations1,2 (IR) has increasingly become a focal point of academic inquiry, driven by t
