US Military

Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during COVID-19

October 11, 2024 by Madeline Lucre Leave a Comment

The US military ran a clandestine campaign in the Philippines and the Middle East during the pandemic to discredit China’s Sinovac vaccine, according to an investigative report by Reuters.

The campaign aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China.

“Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation,” reported Reuters.

Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, created by the US military. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020.

In the Middle East and Central Asia “the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day”.

“A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because sometimes vaccines contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be forbidden under Islamic law.”

By June 2021 the Philippines had the worst vaccination rates in Southeast Asia, COVID cases exceeded 1.3 million and almost 24,000 Filipinos had died from the virus.

US health experts described the revelations as “the worst- case scenario for global public health”.

“The United States Government made a conscious decision to spread information that killed people,” Timothy Caulfield, a University of Alberta public policy expert told Scientific American.

New spike in US suicides – CDC

September 19, 2023 by Madeline Lucre Leave a Comment

The suicide rate in the United States returned to a near-record high in 2021, reversing two years of decline, according to a recent report released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The study showed that suicide was the eleventh leading cause of death nationwide, with more than 14 deaths for every 100,000 people.

The death rate has increased 32 per cent over the past two decades, and the 4 per cent jump between 2020 and 2021 was the sharpest annual increase in that timeframe.

Suicide was the second leading cause of death for people aged 10 to 34, and fifth for people aged 35 to 54.

The suicide death rate was four times higher among men than women in 2021, the CDC data showed.

Rates were highest among Native American people – about twice as high as average for men and three times as high for women – and rates spiked about 17 per cent between 2020 and 2021.

A companion report by the CDC showed that in recent years, adolescents were the age group most likely to visit the emergency department for suicidal thoughts.

Children are facing increasing mental health challenges, with significant shares of both teen girls (57 per cent) and boys (29 per cent) saying they felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021. Nearly 1 in 3 teen girls said they seriously considered attempting suicide, the CDC survey found.

‘Suicide was the second leading cause of death for people aged 10 to 34 in the US.’

Spending on health, not guns, would have made Afghanistan a better place

October 5, 2021 by Madeline Lucre Leave a Comment

The United States could and should have fostered a more stable and prosperous Afghanistan by investing in health, schools, safe water, nutrition, and other social services, says prominent US economist Jeffrey Sachs.

Afghanistan has only 172 hospitals and around a third of the 37 million population has no access to a functional health centre within two hours of their home, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

This is despite the fact the US invested roughly US$946 billion in the country between 2001 and 2021, according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

“Of that $946 billion, fully $816 billion, or 86 per cent, went to military outlays for US troops. And the Afghan people saw little of the remaining $130 billion, with $83 billion going to the Afghan Security Forces. Another $10 billion or so was spent on drug interdiction operations, while $15 billion was for US agencies operating in Afghanistan,” Sachs wrote in the online magazine Project Syndicate.

“That left a meagre $21 billion in ‘economic support’ funding. In short, less than 2 per cent of the US spending on Afghanistan reached the Afghan people in the form of basic infrastructure or poverty-reducing services.” .