Once again, US imperialism has the blood and suffering of millions of Filipinos on its hands.
Reuters recently exposed a Pentagon disinformation campaign to discredit China’s Sinovac vaccine during the pandemic. The campaign was meant to counter what the US perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines.
By the time the campaign was terminated in June 2021, COVID cases had exceeded 1.3 million, and almost 24,000 had died from the virus, the worst death rate in Southeast Asia.
The clandestine military program — which started under Trump and continued under Biden — created hundreds of fake Twitter accounts to spread mistrust in China’s vaccines and PPEs, using hashtags like #ChinaAngVirus (‘China Is the Virus’). The Sinovac vaccine was the most accessible vaccine in the Philippines until early 2022.
When the campaign ended, less than two percent of the population was vaccinated, one of the worst inoculation rates in the region.
The disinformation campaign was cruelly effective.
Just as it is ramping up joint military base building and military exercises in the Philippines, US imperialism shamelessly used the public health of Filipinos as another front of war against China.
This can be seen as no less than a form of biological and psychological warfare.
The current Sinophobia currently being whipped up in the Philippines is a continuation of the US’ psywar tactic. Rather than fixate on the questionable claims about Chinese “spies” infiltrating the Philippines, the Philippine government and Filipino masses should direct their outrage at the US, whose military officials have now admitted to conducting covert psychological operations against the Filipino people, and during one of the country’s most vulnerable moments, no less.
We have said it before, and we’ll say it again: the US’ national interests do not align with the national interests of the Filipino people.
How can we expect the US to defend the lives of fisherfolk in the West Philippine Sea and others threatened by China’s territorial aggression, when the US was so willing to sacrifice Filipino lives by discouraging millions from life saving medicine?
In the eyes of the imperialists, the Filipino people are just collateral damage.
This anti-vax campaign also reveals how little US imperialism cares for the masses of people within the belly of the beast. Well over one million people in the US died from COVID — including a disproportionate amount of Filipino nurses among nurse deaths — while the Trump and Biden administrations spent millions of dollars to discourage people from taking the vaccine in the Philippines, as well as Central and West Asia.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos in the US were working to the bone, many in unsafe working conditions, to send money back to their families in the Philippines just to keep them afloat during the health and economic crisis.
We do not absolve the Duterte and Marcos regimes from the lives lost from COVID either. Their subservience to US imperialism continued to strangle national industry, denying the Filipino people from the very beginning the prospect of domestic vaccine production. On top of an already profit-driven healthcare system dominated by public-private partnerships, Duterte also enforced one of the longest and most militarized COVID lockdown policies in the world. Meanwhile, he and his cronies lined their pockets through corruption schemes like the Pharmally scandal.
Marcos is no better, as he continues to deny Filipinos access to quality healthcare while racking up premium prices for PhilHealth.
US imperialism and the Philippine ruling class are guilty not just for state neglect during the pandemic, but outright murder.
What else can you call the act of lying to someone on their deathbed about a cure that could save their life?
The Pentagon’s disinformation campaign proves that US imperialism and its puppet regimes are the main enemies of the Filipino people. They will not hesitate to sacrifice thousands of lives in the name of superprofits and power.
We demand answers from the US government, especially the Department of Defense.
We demand the Philippine government, through its embassy and consulates, to condemn in the strongest possible terms this campaign, and to push the US government to engage in public dialogue with the Filipino masses here who deserve accountability for the former’s crimes.
And we call on the Filipino people, in our millions abroad and at home, to unite and fight against US imperialism, which is a plague to our sovereignty and to our lives. BAYAN USA | FACEBOOK
