Global health equity undermined by US propaganda against Chinese Covid-19 vaccines

There’s an African proverb that goes, “when two elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets trampled”, which means the weak suffer most in conflicts between the powerful. It’s slightly overused, perhaps because it applies so often. 

The latest trampling comes courtesy of the United States military, according to a Reuters investigation. In late 2020, the army launched a covert psyop (psychological operation) to undermine Chinese Covid‑19 prevention tools such as masks and the state-funded vaccine CoronaVac, which the firm Sinovac Biotech manufactured. 

“China is the virus” was the slogan that the Pentagon-backed revenge plot pushed on social media, apparently to counter Beijing’s unfounded claims that a US laboratory was responsible for the deadly pandemic. The US defence department doesn’t deny it was behind the propaganda campaign, which was the most targeted in the Philippines. 

The first Covid jabs to arrive in the Philippines were from Sinovac, which, at the time, was one of only three inoculations with emergency use authorisation from the US medicines regulator, the Food and Drug Administration. 

The jabs didn’t stand a chance because the life-saving tools landed nearly a year into the US propaganda campaign. 

Six months before the first jabs arrived, an online survey in January of 2021 showed that nearly 60% of the 7 193 respondents were confident in a Covid-19 vaccine made in the US or Europe. About half of the respondents said they were “completely not confident” in a vaccine developed in China or Russia. 

All of this was feeding into the spectacular racism that characterised the response to the pandemic, which the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, after being petitioned by civil society groups, including the African Alliance, confirmed “replicates slavery and colonial-era racial hierarchies”. 

“The roots of this brand preference are not clear,” the researchers wrote in a peer-reviewed journal. This is a chilling sentence to read, knowing what we do now. 

When the injections arrived, health workers at a major public hospital insisted that they receive “the best vaccine”. Months later, the Philippine government signed a deal with the US pharmaceutical company Pfizer to purchase 40 million doses. 

Aid workers, public health experts and even the country’s then president, meanwhile, became increasingly desperate to get people to get vaccinated amid a spiralling death toll, Reuters reports. 

Former president Rodrigo Duterte went as far as threatening the vaccine-hesitant public on television: “You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed.” 

Fuelling mistrust in vaccines, which is already a leading threat to global health, did not seem to affect China’s geopolitical strategy. 

Still, one can only wonder how many people died because they avoided the Sinovac jab. Or how many elders, siblings and parents lost their lives in a futile fight between the world’s wealthiest nations. 

A strange detail of all this is that most Covid-19 vaccines the US donated went to the same Southeast Asian nations where the military campaign was under way. 

Data from the California-based policy research nonprofit theKaiser Family Foundation shows the Philippines received more than 33 million Covid jabs from the US by July 2023, putting the country among the top five recipients of US vaccine donations. 

By the time the donations began to arrive in 2022, work had already been done to address vaccine hesitancy. Only 5% of people said they wouldn’t get vaccinated against Covid-19 by the end of January 2022, compared with 75% in 2020. This is according to a report from the Philippine think-tank OCTA. 

This scandal is a huge setback for those of us fighting for health equity worldwide, but we cannot relent. As long as the myth of inclusive global health persists, our work is clearly cut out.

We must continue to stand up for science, to hold science to account and to never, ever undermine the capacity of communities to lead and determine their own pathways to health and dignity.

Courageous leadership is our only hope for a pandemic resilient world. Those who call themselves our leaders must do better and activists must continue to be fierce in our fight to hold the powerful accountable.

Communities are watching all this politicking. 

They were watching in South Africa when the country’s most senior judge, Mogoeng Mogoeng, publicly prayed for protection against “devilish” Covid vaccines, which he insinuated carried the mark of the beast. 

They were watching as millions of life-saving vaccines were shipped from South Africa to Europe, while most African nations were still waiting for the jabs they’d paid for.

They were watching when African countries were paying more than double what European countries were paying for their vaccines.

With all of this happening how can we be surprised when people distrust the fruits of clinical research? 

We cannot achieve health justice by ignoring people’s political realities. 

The political context determines which of their rights will be realised.

This is why, at the height of the Covid pandemic, the African Alliance went to great lengths to counter the misinformation spread by the powerful. 

We lodged a complaint against Mogeoeng Mogeoeng with South Africa’s Judicial Service Commission for his vaccine remarks. We launched information campaigns explaining why vaccines that weren’t made in the West, such as Sinovac, are safe and effective.

Then, we developed advocacy tools to counter misinformation campaigns that cautioned Muslims against Covid vaccines and secured a fatwa that declared the vaccines to be halaall. 

The myth that the Sinovac vaccine is not halaal was also part of the Pentagon’s revenge plot in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, the Reuters investigation suggests. 

All this sets an unfortunate precedent for the next pandemic, which reveals how little we have learnt from our experiences in HIV and Ebola — and how unwilling those who call themselves our leaders are to meet humanity at our point of need and put political posturing before our lives. 

It will be up to us, as always, the activists, journalists and community leaders, to be the thorns that make the grass harder for warring elephants to disregard. 

Tian Johnson is the founder of the African Alliance, a pan-African health justice nonprofit that advocates for the rights of people who are intentionally ignored.