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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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I agreed with the general thrust of your post, but I note that you're essentially taking it for granted that the DoD ran these campaigns, the campaigns were effective in persuading many Filipinos not to take Sinovac, and many Filipinos died needlessly as a result.

Data point 1: the Philippines reported negative excess mortality during the pandemic. It also reported fewer Covid deaths than many of its neighbours per capita.

Country Covid deaths Population Covid deaths per 100k
Indonesia 162,063 279,798,049 57.92
Malaysia 37,348 34,671,895 107.72
Philippines 66,864 119,106,224 56.14
Taiwan 19,005 23,950,214 79.35
Thailand 34,586 71,885,799 48.11
Vietnam 43,206 99,497,680 43.42

Figures above are from Worldometers.

Data point 2: by March 2023, 79.2 million Filipinos were fully vaccinated, or about 70% of the country. This is about on par with the global average, and higher than several of its neighbours including Thailand and Indonesia (but lower than Malaysia and Vietnam).

One could certainly argue that the DoD are morally implicated by these social media campaigns. If you took actions which you fully intended/expected to result in thousands of needless deaths, the fact that your actions didn't have the desired outcome does nothing to exculpate you (as I recently argued, in the rather different context of Hamas launching rockets at Israel which miss or are shot down). But it seems worthwhile to recognise that even if the DoD undertook certain actions with malicious intent, these actions were ineffective at their apparent goals.