To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.
“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”
Back in 2021 when the first round of COVID vaccines were rolling out, they were (we now know) extremely effective at preventing not only severe disease for the individual, but also infection and spread. Since then, vaccines have been steadily falling behind in the race against new COVID variants, with each generation providing increasingly less immunity1 (although I believe their protection against severe disease is still substantial, and of course any immunity boost is worth its weight in gold).
But new variants staging an evolutionary arms race against vaccines was never an inevitability. The chance of a new variant emerging that's enough more infectious to out-compete the existing dominant variants is not that high; even in today's world of totally uncontrolled global spread, a given variant will remain dominant for many months before being displaced by its successor. How quickly that happens—and whether it happens at all—depends directly on how many new COVID-19 virii are being produced worldwide.
At that moment back in 2021, when vaccines were first becoming available, the US had a chance to stop COVID in its tracks by making sure everyone the world over was able to get a vaccine. Not everyone could or would, but you don't need everyone, you just need enough people to bring down the chance of a vaccine-evasive variant appearing and spreading2. But the US (and the whole global North) is bought and paid for by capitalists, so they refused to release the vaccine patents, let alone manufacture enough vaccine to freely distribute it worldwide. And it's a fundamentally imperialist polity, so—as this article shows—it considered the value of undermining China's credibility higher than the value of saving lives and potentially curtailing the entire pandemic.
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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38465901/. It's also worth noting that other sources I don't have handy suggest that multiple vaccines do build up a small but non-negligible amount of permanent immunity that has so far seemed to be durable across variants, so keep getting vaxxed every six months or so!
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A high global vaccination rate would have other valuable consequences as well, like making it more feasible to do contact-tracing in the event an evasive variant does arise and of course the small matter of saving tens of millions of human lives.
