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Here is a Reuters article titled "Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic".
The article claims that the DoD (under both Trump and Biden) ran a social media disinformation campaign with the goal of convincing people in the Philippines not to take the Chinese COVID vaccine. Per the article, further countries were targeted, with screenshots in Cyrillic and Arabic stating that the Chinese vaccine contained pork gelatin and was thus haram for Muslims.
The article does not provide any independently verifiable conclusive proof for their claims, relying on unnamed DoD sources instead. Personally, I am somewhat convinces (p=0.9) that the key claims in the article are mostly correct. (Minor errors and exaggerations are always possible, perhaps one of the screenshot messages is not actually from a DoD bot.) From browsing other Reuters investigative reports, I get the feeling that they are woke, pro-Ukraine and pro-Palestinians and focusing on US-China relations and atrocities in Africa.
This leaves the morality of such actions.
I am not a fan of social media disinformation campaigns at the best of times. Burning epistemic commons to influence policy seems net-negative. However, I am also enough of a realist to see that a gentlemen's agreement not to use disinformation is well out of reach. So if the DoD is using disinformation to help this or that Philippine president getting elected (or Russia does the same for the US), that is sad by not particularly infuriating.
This is different. When that campaign happened, there was no offer by Western countries to provide Western vaccines on the same scale, time scale and costs as Sinovac. It was either Sinovac or COVID. The medical consensus seems to be that Sinovac is somewhat effective at preventing bad outcomes from COVID. Spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about available vaccines will predictably result in people dying from COVID. Just because your victims are hidden behind a veil of statistics that does not make them any less real. It is fitting that it was the DoD which ran that campaign, because accepting innocent deaths is kind of their dayjob. Morally, their decisions were not different from bombing Manila.
While all armies sometimes kill innocents, a key parameter for judging the morality of such killings is to compare the military effect of an operation to the civilian costs. If this social media campaign was a masterplan to turn mainland China into a liberal democracy, then one might notice that a few ten thousand dead civilians might be a price worth paying.
Of course, it was no such thing. From the article, this is what happened:
So China made Duterte an offer which the West could or would not make at that time, Duterte paid the price in geopolitical concessions, and then the US retaliated by trying to make the payment he got for it less effective. This does not sound like a reasonable geopolitical strategy, but like the petty behavior of a five-year-old.
Most wars are not fought with a "any victory, no matter how small, for any price" frame. For reference, the US is not even in a shooting war with the PRC, just some trade war and saber rattling. Killing civilians of a former ally to punish them for defecting seems incredibly evil.
In general, I would like to see a norm that health services are sacrosanct in conflicts. The Geneva Conventions already forbid marking combat troops with the Red Cross or Red Crescent as well as the use of pathogens in war. By analogy, countries should also not use vaccination programs to hide their spy operations (at least Shakeel Afridi got his just desserts, 33 years in Pakistani prison) or attack medical infrastructure through either computer attacks or disinformation.
Except, of course, that bombing Manila doesn't come with the benefit of un-bombing another city.
Whatever you think of its effectiveness, the Chinese vaccines were not as much a shortage product as all the others, and all their issues aside- issues which you are brushing aside- with any such shortages there is a zero-sum trade off where someone not taking the Chinese vaccines meant someone else could. If you want to say the Americans are responsible for ending lives in this context, you also need to give them credit for saving lives that otherwise wouldn't have been saved because- again- the usage of any limited item is zero-sum. You'd even need to address the consumption calculus, as FUD is naturally countered by the FND (fear/necessity/desperation) of the people who do need the vaccine, and are willing to overcome FUD-doubts, and the implications this has for more effective distribution of any vaccine to those who need it.
There's a lot of points one would take with your framing which I'm generally not interested in pursuing as rabit holes that don't necessarily challenge your end-post preference, starting with how framing it as a disinformation campaign is assuming a conclusion, but just the framing of the ethical implications is off, and that's without addressing the other point of information of any information activity, the receptiveness / agency of the target audience.
I can see the point you are making: if vaccines are in short supply, then it does not matter who is taking them.
As an intuition pump, consider the trolley problem with one person on each track 1 and 2. The train would go to track one, but the operator has some petty personal reason to redirect the train to track two. Perhaps he has just cleaned the ground around track one and does not want to start over from the beginning.
I have some sympathy for almost every decision a trolley operator could make for selfless reasons -- the religious person who does not act lest he kills someone through his actions, the utilitarian who estimates QALYs, the art connoisseur who sacrifices a kid to save a great artist. But the man who decides who should die based on "track two was scheduled for a hosing anyhow" is a monster.
Of course, it is not even true that discouraging people in the Philippines from taking vaccines is utility neutral. For one thing, vaccines are physical things with limited shelf lives. Distributing them throughout the country is already a challenge. Sending surplus vaccines backwards through the distribution pathway is not realistic. Of course, one could set up the distribution in such a way that the amount of vaccines which are left over is minimized, but it is not reasonable to assume that such efforts were taken. It seems more likely that the health officials were vastly overestimating the vaccine enthusiasm.
The other thing is that not all countries are equal. Given that the vaccine originated from China, it is likely that mainland Chinese ended up being the benefactors of the DoD intervention. Mainland China followed a zero-COVID policy until December 2022. If the DoD-induced unpopularity of the vaccine abroad caused Chinese citizens to be vaccinated a few months earlier, the amount of lives that saved might have been fairly minimal.
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