The Pentagon Ran A Secret "Anti-Vax" Campaign During The Pandemic - One of Many Examples of Deception Warfare

A successful U.S. military clandestine program to discredit China’s Sinovac COVID shot sheds light on just how much deception and propaganda influence our thoughts and behaviour.

Image of the Pentagon via Wikimedia Commons

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The word “anti-vax” has become quite futile. During the pandemic and even prior to it, it was used to describe and ridicule those who spread “false claims” about vaccines and vaccine science.

Pointing out actual false claims can be useful, but unfortunately, the term is also used to “debunk” experts in the field who commonly bring up legitimate safety concerns that have surrounded vaccines for decades.

Our sister brand, Collective Evolution, published 628 articles about vaccines and vaccine safety between 2009 and 2021. Almost every article was based on science, expert testimony, injury stories, and was done with journalistic integrity. Yet CE became known as one of the primary ‘anti-vax’ purveyors as a result of our work. We’re no stranger to the term being falsely applied.

More recently, vaccine safety concerns have been a growing issue among scientists and frontline health professionals, as explained at the World Vaccine Summit in 2019. This issue became even more predominant after the distribution of COVID inoculations.

Apart from concerning science (as outlined here, here and here), propaganda commonly comes into play, making it even harder to decipher what is and what isn’t.

U.S. Vaccine Propaganda

One example comes from a recent Reuters investigation which uncovered the fact that, during the pandemic, the U.S. military launched a clandestine program to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – specifically on the Filipino population.

At such a time, if COVID inoculations were indeed crucial and beneficial to the public, why would the U.S. purposefully put lives at risk?

Rhetorical question. Geopolitical wars, us vs them dynamics, and race to the bottom behavior are exactly why they’d do it. We cover this more in our Moloch essay if you’re interested.

During the operation, the U.S. military made phony social media and internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos. Social media posts destroyed the reputation of the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

The Reuters investigation identified at least 300 accounts on X 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.

In the words of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has pinned this story to the top of his twitter feed, “Holy F****.”

After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

“The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines…”

- Chris Bing and Joel Schectman from Reuters

The phony accounts used by the military had tens of thousands of followers during the program. 

Furthermore, the investigation revealed how the U.S. military not only aimed to create doubt and confusion about other foreign inoculations but also aimed to do the same thing around other potentially life-saving aid that was being supplied by China.

We’ve Seen This Before

We saw this with various potential treatments domestically as well, including Ivermectin. During the pandemic, Ivermectin was declared useless and dangerous. Many found this odd given that for many years ivermectin has been used safely to overcome several human diseases in billions of people.

In many regions of the world, ivermectin was approved for treatment. Here in Canada, experts were constantly urging the government to do the same.

Dr. Kanji Nakatsu, a Professor Emeritus of Medicine, Biomedical and Molecular Sciences at Queens University for example, along with thousands of others called upon the Government of Canada to urgently examine the evidence in favour of ivermectin and consider making ivermectin available immediately to Canadians as a schedule II medication, obtained directly from a pharmacist.

Despite these efforts, physicians who wanted to prescribe Ivermectin at the time were in danger of losing their medical license. Anybody who published anything online regarding the efficacy of ivermectin, no matter how credible, was instantly “fact checked” and punished.

Alternative media outlets, like us, were demonetized and destroyed. Clinical trials and other studies/papers examining this issue didn’t really get the attention they deserved if the narrative opposed what governments were telling us.

Sure, maybe ivermectin wasn’t as effective as some claimed it was, but why were we not allowed to even have a conversation around it?

Perhaps it’s because you can’t have emergency authorization for a medical treatment if there are other potential successful treatments available out there.

This type of coordinated sophisticated behaviour was seen not only with potential alternative treatments but with all things COVID. Any piece of evidence, expert opinion or sentiment that opposed government guidelines, information and recommendations was instantly attacked.

Even the British Medical Journal was subjected to “fact checking” and a large smear campaign for exposing fraudulent activities during Pfizer’s COVID vaccine clinical trials.

The journal published a story about how the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial for COVID vaccines.

COVID represented one of the largest censorship and propaganda campaigns in human history. This doesn’t mean that ‘everything we were told was a lie’, it simply means that we were presented with an inaccurate, one-sided view of the pandemic.

This in turn created even more false information and claims by people on both ends of the spectrum.

It wasn’t really about truth during the pandemic, it was about blaming, using condescending language and pejorative terms to sway public opinion while governments and corporations played information warfare to see who could profit the most from the pandemic.

Pfizer has outspent its peers in six of the last eight election cycles, coughing up almost $9.7 million. During the 2016 election, pharmaceutical companies gave more than $7 million to 97 senators at an average of $75,000 per member. They also contributed $6.3 million to President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.

The question is: what did big pharma get in return? The power of the U.S. government to influence the world to take their vaccine, and no other?

Perhaps this recent investigation and clandestine operation is one of many examples of what these companies receive in turn for their efforts in swaying global politics.

Constant Deception

The example above is one of many that illustrates just how powerful and active governments are when it comes to propaganda. Influencing the minds of the masses has long been a critical part of information warfare, and it happens so much that today we are experiencing a giant sensemaking crisis.

The Reuters investigation points out that the U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda, and Reuters found no evidence the Pentagon’s influence operation did so. That being said, it was quite clear that Americans were indeed targeted with vast amounts of false information and propaganda from their own government throughout the pandemic.

For example, emails released during litigation against the Biden administration reveal incredible efforts to silence the concerns of many scientists, doctors, journalists and other experts in the field. The lawsuit showed that the White House pressured Facebook to control information that might harm Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine policy. Facebook obviously complied.

Emails show that a Facebook employee emailed White House officials Andy Slavitt and Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, detailing how the social media giant would reduce the virality of vaccine stories that might discourage the administration’s vaccine policies, like vaccine mandates, even if they contained “true content.”

Emails made public through earlier lawsuits, Freedom of Information Act requests and Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter Files had already exposed a sprawling censorship regime involving the White House as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies.

There are dozens of examples, it’s quite overwhelming. I am sure that you, being a reader of The Pulse are aware of many of them, as we’ve written about them throughout the pandemic.

How Deep Does Deception Go?

The good thing about all of this exposure, and those who continue to expose such things is that it results in people beginning to recognize that there is a degree of corruption involved in our world and that politicians and traditional media outlets have been compromised in the process.

This is also why it’s important to support media outlets who bring this information to light, because, as of now, their only form of support is YOU.

What exactly are governments capable of when it comes to propaganda? How deep does deception go? How often, and how many times does it occur?

Have you ever heard about Operation Northwoods? It was a plan composed by the US intelligence community. In the Northwoods ruse, CIA operatives under aliases would charter a private plane. While in flight, a military drone aircraft indistinguishable from the plane would begin transmitting the private plane’s transponder signal. The plane would land secretly at a military base while the drone aircraft, flown remotely, would be intentionally crashed over Cuba.

American fighter jets disguised as Russian made MiGs would be in the area. Reconnaissance aircraft and ground tracking systems would all report the same thing: the plane was taken down by an unprovoked attack by Cuba. The public would be forced to accept that a full-scale invasion of the island nation was necessary.

Good thing JFK shut this idea down and prevented it from happening!

Obviously, events that actually played out that were similar to Northwoods, is something we many never know. They could be some of the biggest events in human history, like 9/11 for example. You can read more about “false flag” operations here if you’re interested.

Unbelievable truths lead to cognitive dissonance and people labelling things as “conspiracy theories.” But again, given the Moloch dynamic we see in our society, conspiracy is a natural emergence due to system incentives.

No longer is it possible to have a meaningful conversation with those who rely on mainstream media outlets for information as they seem to lack critical information that’s being shared by other credible sources.

The question now is, how do we have conversations about remaining 'conspiracies' seriously? Where we look at the evidence with an open mind and truly see what it says.

It’s clearly time for a serious conversation around these topics. And when we can culturally begin to have these conversations more openly, honestly and with complexity, we may see an improvement in our collective sensemaking.