By David Lethbridge
This is election season south of the border, when we will hear endless talk about democracy and freedom, “the shining city on a hill,” and about how America is the defender of the “free world” and indeed of all human civilization.
It doesn’t matter whether it is a Republican or a Democrat speaking, the same words will be uttered in any number of variations. But look behind the curtain, turn over the rock, and something disgusting scurries away into the darkness.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic the US military launched a secret psychological operation aimed at a swath of countries from the Philippines to the Middle East. They knew without question would cause an untold number of deaths.
This secret Pentagon operation, which began under Trump in the spring of 2020 and was continued under Biden until mid-2021, was carried out at the psyops center in Tampa, Florida and constitutes a new form of biological warfare.
But unlike during the war on Korea, when US troops released infected insects and spiders into the environment in an effort to kill both soldiers and civilians, the Trump-Biden operation relied on an already existing deadly virus, COVID-19. In this case, the Pentagon ran an anti-vax campaign to deliberately discredit China’s Sinovac vaccine and allow the virus to spread among targeted nations.
In the final analysis, this operation was part of the ongoing low intensity warfare aimed at China. Since China was providing Sinovac free or very cheaply to a great many countries, the US was intent on destroying whatever positive feeling might develop between the recipients of the life-saving vaccine and the Chinese state.
Good feelings and gratitude could all too easily turn in to economic and political benefit for China and therefore, as far as US imperialism was concerned, had to be prevented – no matter how many innocent lives would be lost in the process. There was no doubt at all in the minds of the imperialists that masses of people would indeed fall victim to the deadly virus, but such people were entirely dispensable as far as they were concerned. Deaths from this form of biological warfare were the same as if the victims had been shot from a rifle or perished in a bombing, but with the advantage that the perpetrators could appear to keep their hands clean.
Deaths from COVID were especially high in the Philippines, and it was there that the program appears to have started. The Pentagon psychological operations unit in Tampa used at least 300 separate accounts on social media, primarily on Elon Musk’s X, pretending to be Filipinos. These fake accounts insisted that since the virus originated in China, that Chinese vaccines, ventilators, face masks and test kits could not be trusted and should not be used.
Since the Chinese Sinovac vaccine was the only vaccine available, it would appear inevitable that if the people of the Philippines were taken in by these fraudulent US claims, that any number of them would die. And die they did. The infection rate was so high after the US campaign that the Philippine government resorted to threatening the Philippine people with imprisonment if they did not get inoculated.
The clandestine operation was expanded to include Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and other as yet unidentified Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East. Again, the people of these countries, where the virus was killing tens of thousands a day, were warned against using Chinese vaccines. An added claim was that because the vaccines contained a small amount of pork gelatin, they should be considered forbidden by Islamic law.
China’s President Xi Jinping had said that his country’s vaccines would be available “as a global public good throughout the developing world.” Washington, by contrast, tended to favour vaccinating its own population first, and then allowing pharmaceutical companies to use whatever was left over to sell to developing countries at exorbitant prices.
When the truth emerged this summer about the US clandestine psychological operation and the number of unnecessary deaths it doubtlessly caused, a senior military officer involved in the operation had only this to say:
“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective, we were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”
It does not seem to have occurred to him that he is guilty of mass murder, or of the utter criminality of the architects of this inhuman imperialist scheme.
[Photo: #CHINAISTHEVIRUS tweet by US Pentagon, targeting the people of the Philippines]
Support working-class media!
If you found this article useful, please consider donating to People’s Voice or purchasing a subscription so that you get every issue of Canada’s leading socialist publication delivered to your door or inbox!
For over 100 years, we have been 100% reader-supported, with no corporate or government funding.
