“Stigmatising vaccination will lead to a series of consequences, such as a lower inoculation rate, the outbreak and spread of disease, social panic and insecurity, as well as crises of confidence in science and public health,” Sinovac spokeswoman Yuan Youwei told Chinese media.

She said that Sinovac’s corporate goal is to provide vaccines that can eradicate viruses and contribute to the health of people.

“Currently we have overcome Covid, but the world is still not in peace,” Yuan added.

“Sinovac will continue to help people live good and prosperous lives by preventing disease. We reckon that each profession should focus on their specialities, which is the right attitude.”

Edward Snowden, the American whistleblower famous for revealing his country’s surveillance and intelligence collection practices, wrote on his own X account that the US disinformation campaign “is going to be taught in history classes”.

“If the government ever so much as breathes the word ‘disinformation’ again, every journalist in the room had better turn their backs on the podium. They’re stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers (at a minimum!) to poison the internet,” Snowden wrote in another post.

After vaccination, Duterte said he “felt good”, adding that collaboration with Beijing had helped “manifest the friendship between both countries”.

In December 2021, the Philippines received an additional shipment of Sinovac vaccines donated by the Chinese government to help the Southeast Asian country recover from the pandemic.

The US Department of Defence and State Department did not immediately respond to questions about the Reuters investigation.

The US programme started under the administration of former president Donald Trump and continued several months into Joe Biden’s presidency, according to Reuters.

According to the report, social media executives warned the Biden administration the Pentagon was trafficking in Covid-19 misinformation.

The White House issued an order to ban the anti-vax effort in the spring of 2021, according to Reuters, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review.

Lu Xiang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that the US would continue to use sophisticated operations to spread “disinformation” aimed at making up information to weaken an adversary’s credibility and integrity.

“The US chooses geopolitics over public health,” he added. “Whether the Democrats or Republicans, they will both do the same.”

Lu added that at the time of the campaign, the US “wasn’t happy with Duterte’s good relationship with China”.

Wang Zichen, a research fellow at the Beijing-based Centre for China and Globalisation think tank, said that the campaign reflected a zero-sum mentality.

Washington viewed China providing life-saving vaccines to other developing countries, which had been neglected by the Trump administration’s “America First” approach, as somehow detrimental to US interests, he said.

“There can be positive outcomes from US-China competition for the world,” he added.

“A more constructive approach should have been for the US to respond to China’s provision of a global public good by contributing more to the Global South in public health and other domains such as infrastructure.”

Tao Lina, a Shanghai-based vaccine expert, noted that the US attempts to discredit Chinese vaccines did not create “substantive damages” because China was still one of the countries that recorded the highest vaccination rate.

Meanwhile, the behaviour by the US will deal “a big blow” to its own image, Tao added.