Who spread vaccine disinformation in the Philippines? The US military did

In June, Reuters reported on a hitherto secret U.S. program connected with the COVID pandemic. In the spring of 2020, as the coronavirus rapidly spread throughout the world, our government reportedly sought to respond to Chinese disinformation which had attempted to deflect responsibility for the virus’ origin, claiming that it had originated in a biological research lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland. What was the government’s plan? To fight fire with fire.

This was around the same time that Rodrigo Duterte, then the Trump-style president of the Philippines, was making noises about a closer relationship to China, even hinting that if the Beijing government prioritized sending vaccine to his country, he’d be willing to cede disputed territory in the South China Sea. An element  within the U.S. military in the Pacific was reportedly eager to keep the Philippine government on side and fight the deluge of Chinese propaganda. 

So the Pentagon apparently authorized a covert disinformation campaign against China, focusing on discrediting Chinese-developed COVID vaccines and protective medical equipment like masks. The channels for this propaganda included Twitter (now X), Facebook and other social media platforms. The campaign appears to have worked: The Philippines ended up with a very low vaccination rate in international comparison (in spite of Duterte’s efforts), and a relatively high death rate. 

While it is generally acknowledged that the Chinese vaccine (known as CoronaVac or Sinovac) is less effective than those developed by Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax, it is hardly useless: It’s typically 60 to 70 percent effective, versus the roughly 90-percent effectiveness of Western vaccines. So it would almost certainly have saved lives in the Philippines, if not for the U.S. disinformation campaign.

It’s all there in the Reuters reporting, and there is no need to expatiate on the obvious immorality of the operation, quite apart from its colossal stupidity. At the same time as U.S. public health officials were tearing out their hair trying to combat domestic COVID disinformation, and doctors and nurses were risking their lives caring for terminally ill vaccine refusers, their government was pumping the same ideological poison into the minds of innocent people abroad. The nonchalant statement of an unnamed Pentagon official says it all: “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective. We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”

The report left a few dangling loose ends, however, that deserve further investigation by Congress and the Pentagon inspector general:

Are U.S. special forces out of control? The report says that the program was initiated after persistent lobbying by the then-commander of Special Operations Command Pacific, Gen. Jonathan Braga. The article implies that he pleaded directly to Washington. Did his superiors at U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii know what he was doing? Did they approve? We know from Reuters that various U.S. ambassadors in Southeast Asia did not approve, and would ordinarily have overruled a stupid idea that could harm diplomatic relations. But because then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper designated the propaganda campaign as a de facto wartime action, the diplomats’ objections could be disregarded.

U.S. special forces were vastly expanded during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and were given greater operational flexibility. They have also tended to produce loose cannons throughout the ranks. Gen. Stanley McChrystal was special forces commander at the height of the  Iraq war and later became commander of all coalition forces in Afghanistan. His career came to grief when he had the bad judgment to insult President Obama other civilian leaders in front of a Rolling Stone reporter. Apparently, the civilian pukes in Washington lacked the general’s gung-ho confidence that with just a little more door-kicking and pyrotechnics, Afghanistan would be pacified — something that hadn’t happened since the Mongol invasions.

This kinetic mentality can get out of hand, as it did in 2017. Four Navy SEALs who were posted to the U.S. embassy in Mali, in a “juvenile” attempt to haze an Army special forces soldier, wound up killing him. Their court martial, in a strange display of leniency, sentenced the most culpable perpetrator to just 10 years in prison, while one of the four defendants did not even receive a punitive discharge. The 10-year sentence was later vacated, with the defendant hiring a Trump lawyer to get him off the hook.

Ironically, vaccine refusal was the cause of another special forces stunt. Personnel from the Navy Special Warfare Command, including SEALs, declined to be vaccinated and sued the Department of Defense. Their venue-shopping landed them in the Fort Worth, Texas, courtroom of U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, a favorite destination for nutty conservative causes. Shockingly but not surprisingly, O’Connor ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. Ultimately, the Supreme Court blocked the judge’s ruling, but only insofar as it allowed the Navy to reassign the plaintiffs, rather than discipline or discharge them, while litigation continued.

What the personnel had done merited not merely reassignment or discharge, but potentially a court martial for deliberately rendering themselves undeployable, endangering other service members, gross insubordination and possibly even mutiny, as it was an organized action against their unit. 

I have written before about the ways religion is bandied about for political advantage by people whose own religious faith is ludicrously insincere. The justification of the SEALs — whose profession is to kill people — was a risible claim that Christian devotion prompted their refusal, advancing the heretofore undiscovered theological tenet that modification of their bodies by vaccine was an “affront to their Creator.” Apparently that doctrine exempts steroid abuse, which is common in the Navy’s special warfare community.

Even the military has begun to recognize that special forces may have become the tail that wags the dog — too big (larger in scale than the entire German army), diluted in quality, often operating outside the regular chain of command and widely infected with a cowboy mentality. The mindless popular adulation of Navy SEALs in particular has had an adverse impact on civil-military relations, according to some observers. Perhaps we will always need door-kickers, but should they be able to overrule ambassadors in order to execute a cruel and asinine operation in a friendly country?

Who ultimately ordered the covert operation? The Reuters piece noted that Secretary Esper signed the directive to conduct the operation. The legality of his action rested on a provision in the 2019 defense authorization act permitting the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, including “outside of areas of active hostilities.”

This only raises more questions. Were the defense and intelligence committees of Congress, then controlled on the House side by Democrats, duly notified? If so, did the notification simply state that a covert psychological operation was underway, or did it provide enough details to make it clear that it was based on lies that could endanger the population of a friendly country? What was the reaction in Congress?

It seems unlikely that even as powerful a bureaucratic actor as the secretary of defense would order such a sensitive operation in defiance of the State Department without the guidance of those above him, or at least without their sign-off. The rules of Washington would normally impel a person at Esper’s level to seek cover for his actions. Accordingly, it is probable that he either notified the president directly or through the National Security Council of his order.

That president, of course, would have been DonaldTrump, who had already directed the CIA in 2019 to conduct covert psychological operations inside China. It’s hardly a stretch to speculate that he would have had no problem approving a covert Pentagon operation in the Philippines. It is one more reason why Trump and his appointees should never again be entrusted with public office. Will Congress ever investigate this misbegotten operation and finally nail down the chain of events?

How do we know the operation did not blow back on the United States? The military is prohibited by law from conducting propaganda campaigns in the United States. But given the instant global connectedness of the internet, how could the Pentagon be so sure that its black propaganda campaigns in other countries wouldn’t leak back to the American population? They were, after all, using Twitter and Facebook accounts. 

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According to the Census Bureau, the Filipino population in the United States was 4.4 million in 2020, the third-largest Asian-American group. It is inconceivable that none of them would have had contact with friends and relatives in the Philippines who might have been gulled by the American disinformation. If their contacts made them vaccine-hesitant, that could easily have exacerbated the already epidemic anti-vaccine movement here. Given the disproportionate number of Filipino nurses working in the U.S. health care system, this could have had a measurable impact on public health. 

Why did it take so long to shut down the program? Shortly after Joe Biden’s inauguration, representatives from Facebook arranged a meeting with officials of the new administration to complain about the covert program, which contradicted the company’s policy against spreading vaccine disinformation. The officials were reportedly horrified, but again, there are loose ends to the Reuters story.

Why hadn’t the new administration learned about the program through Pentagon channels already, during the presidential transition? Why did it take until the spring of 2021 to order DOD to shut it down? And in spite of the order, why did the program linger through the summer? Was the Biden administration lax in its follow-up, or was the Pentagon out of control?

Over the decades, the U.S. military has conducted numerous programs of breathtaking stupidity: the above-ground nuclear tests of the 1950s that exposed draftees to atomic radiation, dumping thousands of tons of Agent Orange defoliant over Indochina during the 1960s, the toxic burn pits of the Iraq war. Civilian leadership in this country needs to shed its adolescent awe of martial derring-do and gain firm control over a very dangerous weapon.