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Jeddah - Yasmine El Tohamy - MANILA: An alleged US covert operation to discredit Chinese vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic has fueled dismay and anger among Filipino health workers, who say vaccine hesitancy prevented them from saving more people out of the tens of thousands killed.

A Reuters investigation published last week found that the US military launched a secret propaganda campaign at the height of the pandemic in the Philippines to spread misinformation and influence public discourse on the efficacy of China’s Sinovac inoculation as well as other lifesaving aid supplied by Beijing. 

The operation, which began in 2020 and lasted until mid-2021, involved fake social media accounts — with Reuters identifying at least 300 of them on X — that were meant to sow doubts about Sinovac among Filipinos. The Reuters report alleged that the program was payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. 

Sinovac was the first available COVID-19 vaccine in the Philippines, where its rollout was marred by fears over its supposed unreliability. Vaccine hesitancy among Filipinos was higher than other countries in the region, with almost half unwilling or unsure whether they should be vaccinated as of September 2021, according to a report by the World Bank. 

Frontline health workers who served at the Philippine General Hospital, the country’s main hospital for COVID-19, said it came at the cost of Filipino lives. 

“If the misinformation propaganda was real … the views of the general public about the importance of vaccines may have been affected by these troll farms. We know that Filipinos, especially the elderly, can easily believe what they read online,” Andro Carl Coronejo, a staff nurse at PGH’s pediatric intensive care unit, told Arab News, referring to organizations employing people to deliberately manipulate public opinion. 

“I think if it didn’t happen, more people would have been compliant earlier with vaccines. Hence, more lives would have been saved.” 

The pandemic death toll reached over 66,000 in the Philippines, making it the second highest in Southeast Asia after Indonesia. 

Bryan Elvambuena, who was an internal medicine resident at PGH in 2020, said many people could have survived had it not been for disinformation. He believes it influenced his patients, many of whom had severe COVID-19. 

“I was dismayed and I found it counterproductive and pathetic, because we tried our best to inform people to get vaccinated with the readily available vaccines,” Elvambuena said. 

Filipino health workers recalled how the pandemic brought the country’s healthcare system to the brink of collapse, as doctors and nurses struggled to care for COVID-19 patients amid surging cases. 

During one of her shifts as a staff nurse at PGH in 2020, Dianne de Castro said she was the only other person on duty to care for 24 patients, at least four of whom were hooked up to mechanical ventilators and life support machines. 

“It makes me wonder how we could have prevented or at least lessened the mortalities, the lives lost during the dark time in our generation. ​​I’ve worked in healthcare for around four years before COVID-19 hit, but I’ve never been this scared of seeing so many moms, dads, siblings, relatives, and friends die day in and day out,” De Castro told Arab News. 

“This ploy to spread misinformation to the public angers me. I still view Sinovac (as) a capable vaccine for COVID-19 and spreading this rumor is as close (as) cutting off the oxygen supply of a person gasping for air and fighting for his life.” 

For her, the US propaganda campaign may be a “crime against humanity” that robbed people of the chance to survive the pandemic and stole them away from their families. 

“My patients deserved so much better,” she said. “If this misinformation ploy was only driven for politics and greed, the ones in power now have blood on their hands.”