On June 14, 2024, Reuters published a long and complex investigative article on a clandestine military propaganda operation in the Philippines, an operation that endangered the health of the population. Through various social media platforms the Special Operations Command of the Pentagon spread false information about China’s anti-Covid Sinovac vaccine, the only one available to the population in the first year of the pandemic, until Pfizer and other more effective vaccines became available “in early 2022”.

Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus (here).

As the covid plague took a heavy toll in the Philippines (population ~115m, ~4m cases) the government began an urgent vaccination program, with President Duterte so desperate at one point that he threatened to jail anyone refusing vaccination.

When he addressed the vaccination issue, the Philippines had among the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia. Only 2.1 million of its 114 million citizens were fully vaccinated – far short of the government’s target of 70 million. By the time Duterte spoke, COVID cases exceeded 1.3 million, and almost 24,000 Filipinos had died from the virus. The difficulty in vaccinating the population contributed to the worst death rate in the region. . .

“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”

What is striking about this operation is that it required a special waiver from Congress. Normally, the military could not mount an operation of this sort without first getting the approval of the State Department and / or the local ambassador. But Congress provided a convenient exception in 2019 authorizing clandestine operations outside of combat areas. Moreover Secretary of Defense Mark Esper had already secretly “elevated the Pentagon’s competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling commanders to sidestep the State Department when conducting psyops against those adversaries.”

The excuse for the operation was retaliation for China’s accusation that the corona virus originated in Fort Detrick’s laboratory, possibly brought to Wuhan by an American military sports team a month prior to the outbreak. The article says that such an accusation was never proven, but it has never been refuted either. Washington and Beijing had been trading accusations from the get-go but the origin of the virus has yet to be established; there are only competing theories.

For a fuller picture of the issues readers of this brief article may click on the link provided above. There are however other issues that Reuters does not address.

For example, what role did the operation play in the rise of Marcos to the Philippine presidency and the denigration of Duterte? Was there another local political objective to the operation beyond “dragging China through the mud” at a time of increasing collaboration between Manila and Beijing and widespread global south appreciation for China’s willingness to provide its (less effective but still approved) vaccine?

What about the Reuters article itself? Such operations are “clandestine,” that is, secret. On Washington’s orders Britain arrested and tortured Julian Assange for disclosing secrets of this kind. How and why did it come to light? A different article mentioned a “military source.” Could it be that an officer sympathetic to Duterte and opposed to Marcos’ anti-China confrontations found and released the information for local political reasons? Did Marcos’ about face on the latest Thomas Shoal confrontation, his refusal to summon in his American backers, have anything to do with the Reuters revelations?

And finally, what are we to think of the all those endless media reports denigrating China and other officially designated “enemies” of Washington: Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and so forth? What confidence can anyone have in reports on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, the Chinese economy, the Chinese leadership?

If the Fourth Estate has collapsed into the arms of the state, perhaps a citizen’s only defense is to grant zero credibility to the establishment media and simply seek out dissident or disaffected men and women of knowledge and integrity, often critics of the system, like Nobel Prize Winner Andrei Sakharov from the USSR, figures such as Jeffrey Sachs, Chas Freeman, Alastair Crooke, Larry Wilkerson and many others who have a youtube channel.