Former vaccine czar Secretary Carlito Galvez, Jr. said he has doubts about an investigative report alleging US-backed propaganda to discredit China and its Sinovac vaccine.
In a statement, Galvez, who headed the government’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign, said: “I believe it is not true.”
Reuters reportedly identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former US military officials with knowledge of the Philippines’ vaccine programs. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus, which is Tagalog for “China is the virus.”
Galvez said, “I am not aware of anything like this since all countries through their embassies are trying to help us to acquire available vaccines in the market.”
“As far as I can remember, most of our friends and allies even said that ‘the best vaccine is the vaccine in our shoulders.’ Meaning whatever vaccine we had and available, we have to take it immediately,” he said.
Sinovac was one of the COVID-19 vaccines made available to the Philippines at the height of the pandemic, along with Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, among others.
The Philippines signed the 25 million doses supply deal with Sinovac in mid-January.
According to the country’s Food and Drug Administration, CoronaVac showed an efficacy rate of 65.3% based on trials in Indonesia, and up to 91.2% based on trials done in Turkey, involving adults aged 18 to 59 years.
According to Galvez, all of the Philippines’ allies at that time appeared to be in support of any vaccine available at hand.
For the Department of Health (DOH), a Reuters investigative report on an alleged “secret campaign” of the US military “to discredit China’s Sinovac” vaccination which targeted the Philippines, “deserve[s] to be investigated.”
The DOH on Sunday released a statement on the Reuters report, which said: “The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public.”
“At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus,” the Reuters report said.
When asked for a comment, the DOH said: “The findings by Reuters deserve to be investigated and heard by the appropriate authorities of the involved countries.”