As I said, I can believe this happened. So, I’m not going to fight hard against this story. I expect it to turn out to be mostly true. That said, stuff like this:

In uncovering the secret U.S. military operation, Reuters interviewed more than two dozen current and former U.S officials, military contractors, social media analysts and academic researchers.

… means absolutely nothing. That can be a mix of some 80 year old retired official from any government department who has no authority or idea about the topic. There are literally Millions of contractors, they could have worked for any branch of the military. Caterers are military contractors. I’m not even sure there is a qualification for “social media analyst” and an academic researcher is anyone with a degree doing study. It sounds impressive, but says absolutely nothing.

Although the Chinese vaccines were found to be less effective than the American-led shots by Pfizer and Moderna, all were approved by the World Health Organization.

That also says nothing new, really. Found by who? The people doing propaganda? How much less effective? Is it always less effective? It was always approved by the WHO. That’s also not new information.

My problem isn’t with the story. It’s with the lack of verifiable facts, sources and proof a statement this huge demands. It uses a lot of words to pad out and disguise the simple fact that at the end of the day, they have one unnamed “senior official” and some bot accounts. I’d be just as ready to believe those were being run by some local opposition party who wanted western vaccines. Edward Snowden was an unnamed source for a hot minute, too. So that alone isn’t a killer of truth, but even when he was unnamed, the Guardian had piles of hard evidence to back up the 2012 Pentagon stories.

This article has a tabloid feel. I don’t like it. Reuters used to be better than this.