i rlly do not think white global northerners understand how fucking bad the anti sinovac psyop was in context of the philippines and other targeted countries being from the global south, with a history of economic and military intervention and destabilization by the usa specifically.
i live in the philippines and sinovac was the only available vaccine for MONTHS of the pandemic. people were fucking dying and we had no pfizer, no j&j, no astrazeneca, no moderna. sinovac was the ONLY vaccine supply we had. and the supply wasnt even enough for even my small city. we do not have the infrastructure to manufacture our own vaccines and tests. we were entirely reliant on imports from other countries who Did have the capacity to manufacture such things
i got up early for several days straight to go to a pop up walk in vaccination site (were talking there by 7:30am) set up in a fucking public basketball court because it was the only way to get vaccinated, and 3 times i had to go back empty handed so to speak after exposing myself to this massive opportunity for transmission because they fucking ran out of shots and prioritized the elderly and disabled and i didnt have my legal pwd (person with disability) card yet. i had to go to a different barangay (local unit of government) to get my shot MONTHS LATER and only got mine because one of my family was in the local govt and reserved some shots for us.
many filipinos use facebook which is where some of the psyop was conducted because you can use it for free on your phone and it is often where news is disseminated. i know we have that joke about People Believing Anything They See On Facebook but i cannot stress enough that people here get local news from fb the same way you (used to) get news from twitter about shit like localized emergencies and whatnot.
because we are third world, you know that the state of our education system is nothing compared to the states. media and news literacy here is dangerously low and the population is sensitive to mis/disinformation, as can be seen during the 2022 presidential elections where the usa Also interfered lol. i cannot stress enough how much of the population was susceptible to this psyop, especially those in poverty who couldnt afford proper education. hell, even educated people fell for this shit. do you think jhunjhun who didnt finish grade 6 would be able to identify disguised foreign intervention that was in his own language?
we were already recovering from public scrutiny of a different vaccine, a dengue vaccine, which lowered public trust in inoculation. and then the usa goes and does THIS??? i cannot emphasize enough that they are directly responsible for the tens and thousands of unvaccinated covid deaths. they are responsible for my friends having to bury their unvaxxed parents and grandparents at the age of 19. they are responsible for mass death and disability.
but were just a country in the periphery. so who cares about us? our lives are worthless to the usa, which is why they admitted that they did this when they would otherwise “never” to their own population. third worlders arent real people to your government. we are merely statistics and a petri dish for experimentation. so who cares if we die? the real important thing isnt our lives, its that the usa has more control over us than china.
This also happened in Argentina, where the “russian and chinese vacciness” were deemed “dangerous” by multiple psyops while we were on our way to develop our own vaccine (also deemed “not ready for humans” by several politicians while it VERY MUCH WAS) while moderna and astrazeneca were lauded. In a context of a country with public mass vaccination and no antivaxxer history - unlike the US and europe - we started having the biggest antivaxxer moves which eventually became the fertile ground for the current fascist goverment to take root and expand its reach, by starting with that unhinged, scared part of the population.
Four years later? CONICET - the science institute that develops vaccines and other scientific advancements - is being defunded and torn to pieces, so is our nuclear systems (lauded as even more advanced than the USA’s and Europe’s) while our national resources even have a nice little USA military base :)
All COVID vaccinations were done through the public sector and you couldn’t choose which vaccine you took – which these sectors used to fuel a bunch of distrust over a truly good vaccination campaign. My grandma used to call me before I got each vaccine telling me “tell them to give you the english vaccine!!” like that by itself had some merit.
People from the US think it’s conspiracy and don’t understand how their country just again and again organise these massive psyops that either divide our populations, introduce problems and sections that weren’t there before and/or implant puppet goverments just so they can have an easier access to our resources, land and bodies.