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.

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.

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Inside a plant in China producing the WHO-approved Sinovac Covid-19 vaccine

Inside a plant in China producing the WHO-approved Sinovac Covid-19 vaccine
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.