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.”
“Meanwhile, there are published, peer-reviewed studies like that of Tejero et al. in BMC Public Health which found that ‘[v]vaccination decisions among Filipinos are determined by their age, educational attainment, health insurance, employer requirement, high awareness of the disease, and a high level of vaccine confidence,” the DOH said.
Sinovac was one of the COVID vaccines made available to the Philippines at the height of the pandemic, along with Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, among others.
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.”
