Washington DC - A bombshell investigation revealed that the Pentagon ran a sophisticated and anti-vaccine campaign in the Philippines in order to counter Chinese influence.

Reuters reported on the Defense Department-led "propaganda effort," which was meant to reduce trust in the Sinovac vaccine produced by China during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Some 300 accounts on X, then Twitter, were flagged for sharing vaccine misinformation under the hashtag "#Chinaangvirus," a Tagalog term which roughly translates to "China is the virus."

The discovery came after former US officials anonymously spilled the beans on a coordinated anti-vax effort in the spring of 2020, beginning under President Donald Trump and continued months into the Biden administration.

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The campaign appears to have ended in mid-2021, but not before it was expanded beyond the Philippines and South East Asia.

In the Middle East, the Pentagon spread the idea that Chinese vaccines should be forbidden under Islamic law due to small traces of pork gelatin.

Amid ongoing and rapidly increasing tensions between the Philippines and China, the news that the US may have deliberately undermined the Filipino vaccination effort during the pandemic received a lot of criticism.

Reuters cited a spokesperson for the Pentagon who did not deny the allegations, instead justifying them by saying the US "uses a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the US, allies, and partners."

That appears to be a reference to Beijing's own disinformation campaign, in which it claimed that the US was to blame for Covid.

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Statista revealed that from the beginning of the pandemic up to May 2023, about 66,400 people had died from Covid-19 in the Philippines. The country had also vaccinated about 77% of its population.

The Philippines' department of health said that "findings by Reuters deserve to be investigated and heard by the appropriate authorities of the involved countries."