The US Government Anti-Vax Campaign Confirms Them As Enemies of Humanity

It was revealed this week that in 2020 and 2021 the Pentagon ran an anti-vax disinformation campaign to undermine Asia’s efforts to vaccinate its population with China’s covid vaccine.

The campaign used fake social media accounts on numerous platforms to lie about the safety and effectiveness of China’s vaccine, pushing in particular the outrageous falsehood that the vaccine contained pork gelatine to dissuade Muslims from being vaccinated.

How many died as a result? We’ll never know.

One of the primary targets of the disinformation campaign was the Philippines, a country that had one of the lowest covid vaccination rates in the world despite the government pleading with citizens to get vaccinated.

So to be clear: the US government was instilling fear and spreading lies about covid vaccines to tens of millions of Asians while attacking western anti-vaxxers for undermining its own domestic vaccination efforts.

The revelation is despicable and shocking, highlighting a cartoonish level of evil at the highest echelons of the US government.

But we shouldn’t be shocked. This is what the US is. The enemy of humanity.

The self-proclaimed home of freedom and democracy has been built atop a mountain of corpses.

The slaughtered, torn apart, dismembered, mulched, poisoned and executed human bodies, millions upon millions of them, have been stacked up over two centuries to assert imperial American power.

In recent years Muslims have been the primary target, and anti-Muslim racism was, with the lies about gelatine, built squarely into a campaign run out of the US military’s psychological operations HQ in Florida. When asked about the life and death impact it had, an official is reported to have said “we weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective.”

Translation: we didn’t care how many people we killed. We weren’t even thinking about it.

The revelations should also end any doubts that the US runs the kind of global disinformation campaigns they cry about when it comes to Russia and China. It’s unlikely that any country’s efforts in this regard top the US.

Every US accusation about Russian or Chinese disinformation is a confession.

No wonder so few trust anything the government says. No wonder conspiracies abound. In this way the effect is a boomerang, helping fuel domestic anti-vaxxers who trade in suspicion of official narratives and government lines.

How can we build a safe, thriving world with these kinds of people in charge? We can’t. The world to them is zero-sum, human lives mere pieces on a board, expendable for the goal of maintaining US hegemony and supressing dissent.

And not just abroad. Citizens who fail to tow the line and submit to US power at home are seen and treated as the enemy. Look at the pro-Palestine protests. The Black Lives Matter protests. The Standing Rock protests before them.

The message is loud and clear: when we decide it’s justified to kill Muslims and black people we’ll do it. When we decide stealing indigenous land for oil pipelines is in the best interests of America, we’ll do it. And if you try to stop us we’ll hurt you.

It’s brute nationalism, with those in opposition treated not as democratic actors with a legitimate grievance, but as traitors against whom overwhelming force should be used.

In a related context, it’s hard to see the US-EU trade war against Chinese electric vehicles and solar energy in anything other than this light.

China is producing high quality clean energy tech at low prices, far outdoing the US and Europe when it comes to solar production. China is now able to produce more than twice as many solar modules as the world installs each year.

As a result, China has electrified more of its economy than the US and Europe.

In a world run on logic and science, this would be celebrated. With climate breakdown accelerating, our leaders would figure out how to deepen and expand this revolution and work with China for the benefit of humanity.

In this grim world, where geopolitical games override common humanity, the Biden administration has imposed up to 50% tariffs on photovoltaic imports from China, something not even Trump did. (Of course when Trump did a trade war it was very bad and hurt Americans. When Biden does it, the liberal media proclaim it is very good actually.)

Europe, in a coordinated move in early June, also announced new tariffs on Chinese solar because they say China has been ‘dumping’ solar in European markets.

In human language this means China has been making solar panels at such scale that they can sell them outside China for cheap prices so people can generate clean energy, but this is bad because…China. So our leaders are going to punish them for being good at a thing we’re not as good at, even if that punishment makes it more expensive to generate non-fossil energy and harms efforts to slow climate change.

Zero-sum, even if the virus decimates, the world burns, the crops fail and we all die.

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I wrote a twitter thread this week about how our societies impose a pressure not to disclose ill health and how this makes communicating about health, especially during a pandemic, really difficult. A lot of people related to it and as I know plenty of you who read this aren’t on twitter, I thought I’d reproduce it here.

People often keep their ill health a secret because in capitalist societies with supremacist foundations ill health is considered a personal failing and a sign of weakness. Becoming 'unproductive' is treated like a crime unto the system.

This mindset is embedded into institutions, from governmental to medical, and is why people with chronic illness are so often dismissed by doctors and told to get back to work by the state. To support you in your ill health would be considered a reward for ‘weakness.’

You can find people who want to help, but they are the exception not the rule and tend to be people who themselves have an oppositional mindset to the mainstream. To flip this around requires flipping the system. We can’t tweak or reform our way out of ideology.

So when it seems baffling that record ill health is being ignored even though it appears to damage the goals of the system i.e. lots of sick people hurt the ability to generate profit and growth, you have to think beyond pure rationality and understand the ideologies of dominance and violence upon which the system rests.

The system cuts off its nose to spite its face, because it prefers, is practised in, and is more comfortable with exercising ideologies of harm.

Pandemics are mass deadly but also socially awkward because they make personal health into a public property and we don't know how to talk about it, don’t want to talk about it or have been stripped of the tools. This partly explains the rush to end covid.

The scary thing is how deeply and unconsciously many people have embedded these ideas of health supremacy and, by extension, violence. The stories of people becoming ill and being abandoned by friends, let alone doctors or government agencies, speaks to this.

And we have seen that when it comes to public health, political allies fade away, normally revolutionary left discoursers stubbornly refuse to make the links between empire, imperial violence and public health because they are also just a bit grossed out by sick people.

But it goes the other way too. Many examples on this site of covid cautious people or people with long covid in support of the genocide of Palestinians because they refuse to understand the abandonment of covid protections as a product of the ideologies they support in other violent contexts.

The era of enlightenment and rationality has been oversold. I often fall into the trap myself of thinking we face an information problem on all the issues: 'if only X people knew these SCIENCE facts.'

Don't stop talking obviously, but lack of knowledge is not the main problem.