Pentagon not denying secret campaign to discredit Chinese vaccines
- US Department of Defence alludes to need to counter Beijing’s ‘malign influence’
The US Defence Department did not deny a report accusing the Pentagon of orchestrating a secret campaign meant to discredit Chinese Covid-19 vaccines, and suggested that the move was an attempt to counter “malign influence campaigns” run by Beijing.
The department said on Sunday, in response to a query about a Reuters report that the Pentagon tried to discredit the quality of Chinese face masks, test kits and the country’s Sinovac vaccine, that it conducts “a wide range of operations, including operations in the information environment (OIE), to counter adversary malign influence”.
The report said the campaign to discredit the Chinese vaccine began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, several months into the administration of US President Joe Biden.
The latest development on this front underscores how far Washington and Beijing were, and still are, from cooperation on efforts to end the pandemic that had by that point killed more than 4 million people worldwide.
One White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said staff “were still trying to chase down” the report’s details to confirm them. The State Department referred the Post’s query to the Pentagon.
