China lashes out at US over report of Pentagon's secret anti-vax campaign

Beijing has called on Washington to "stop fabricating and disseminating false information" in response to a report that the Pentagon ran a secret campaign during the Covid-19 pandemic to discredit China's vaccines.

"The facts have proven time and again that the United States has consistently spread false information through the manipulation of social media, poisoned the public opinion environment and smeared the image of other countries. China firmly opposes this," foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian told reporters in Beijing on Monday.

He said Washington should "set its mind right, shoulder its responsibilities as a great power, and stop fabricating and disseminating false information against other countries".

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Foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian accused the US of spreading false information. Photo: dpa alt=Foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian accused the US of spreading false information. Photo: dpa>

Lin was responding to a media query about a Reuters investigation published on Friday that said the Pentagon had tried to discredit the quality of Chinese face masks, test kits and Chinese biopharmaceutical company Sinovac's vaccine. The shot was the first Covid-19 jab to become available in the Philippines, which had struggled to source vaccines during the pandemic.

Reuters said the campaign 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 report quoted a senior US military officer directly involved in the campaign in Southeast Asia as saying: "We didn't do a good job sharing vaccines with partners. So what was left to us was to throw shade on China's."

Lin said the officer's words had "exposed the truth and intentions of the US in launching a disinformation campaign against other countries".

"If the US wants to contain and suppress a country, it will ignore the truth, and coordinate resources to discredit and slander [the country]," he said.

Lin said this could also be seen "in the smearing of the popular Belt and Road Initiative and the rumours about overcapacity in China's new-energy vehicles, which are in high demand and supply".

"Such practices don't not reflect the strong capabilities of the US, but only reveal its hegemony and hypocrisy," he said, calling on the international community to have a "clear understanding" of the issue.

Sinovac hit back over the report on Saturday, calling the Pentagon campaign a "wrong attack that will create enormous disaster".

On Sunday, the US Defence Department did not deny the report and suggested that the move was an attempt to counter Beijing's "malign influence campaigns".

It said the department conducts "a wide range of operations, including operations in the information environment, to counter adversary malign influence".

The reported campaign was within the time frame that Chinese officials suggested in social media posts and press conferences that a US Army facility should be investigated as a potential source of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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