China lashes out at US over report of Pentagon’s secret anti-vax campaign
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.
“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.
It said the department conducts “a wide range of operations, including operations in the information environment, to counter adversary malign influence”.