H. Michiel,
18 June 2024

During the election period, the EU had pulled out all the stops to intercept “disinformation actors from inside and outside the EU” as they “seek to undermine the integrity of the electoral process and trust in democratic processes and sow division and polarisation in our societies.” The EU knows very well in which direction to look: towards the east, towards Russia and China, yet especially towards Russia. Already in 2015, a working group was therefore set up “to combat disinformation campaigns emanating from Russia”. That the danger comes from the east is already clear in the name of the working group: the East StratCom taskforce. One of its realisations is the website EUvsDiSiNFO where European citizens are warned in detail about all the real or alleged fake news the Kremlin is behind.

Not only the European elections, but also the Covid virus meant a period when disinformation actors from the east could be active. “Foreign actors and certain third countries, in particular Russia and China, conduct targeted influence and disinformation campaigns around COVID-19 in the EU, in its neighbouring countries and worldwide, with the aim of undermining democratic debate and strengthening polarisation in society, as well as enhancing their own image in the context of COVID-19,” the European Commission revealed in 2020.  However, it took until 2024 for the renowned Reuters news agency to find out that fake news can also come from the West, and can even have deadly consequences on a large scale .

Indeed, Reuters revealed a few days ago that the Pentagon, i.e. the US Department of Defence, launched a major disinformation campaign during the corona period to damage China’s image. According to the US military, the People’s Republic risked gaining too much influence through supplies of the cheap Chinese corona vaccine Sinovac to various countries in Asia. Specifically, in 2020 – 2021, the Philippines was wrought with fake news, allegedly emanating from Filipinos, that brought down the quality of Sinovac. The tenor was often that the virus came from China, and thus vaccines from China were unreliable. To further intimidate the Muslim part of the population of the Philippines, it was mentioned that the vaccines contained gelatine derived from pigs. The fake news campaign started under President Trump, but continued under Biden until spring 2021, notwithstanding his administration had been warned that this was a case of psychological warfare emanating from the Pentagon.

Convincing the population to get vaccinated had already proved difficult in the Philippines. The government had counted on 70 million vaccinated people out of 114 million residents, but by mid-2021 there were only 2.1 million. The mortality rate there was the highest in the region. Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the Pentagon campaign in the Philippines are lacking.

What is striking in this story is that the covert operation was not run by the CIA, but by a small team within the military. ‘Hybrid warfare’ is no more off limits for the Pentagon than it is for the Kremlin. Of course, with the European fake news radars only turned to the east, this will never be detected in the West.