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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.
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.
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.
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