TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) – Chinese state media have expressed concern about Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, despite rigorous trials suggesting it is safe. A government spokesman raised the unfounded theory that the coronavirus could have originated from a U.S. military laboratory, giving it more confidence in China.
As the ruling Communist Party is increasingly questioned about China’s vaccines and renewed criticism of the early COVID-19 response, it strikes back by encouraging conspiracy theories that experts say could cause harm.
State media and officials are casting doubt on Western vaccines and the origin of the coronavirus in an apparent attempt to divert the attacks. Both issues are in the spotlight due to the introduction of vaccines worldwide and the recent arrival of a team from the World Health Organization in Wuhan, China, to investigate the origin of the virus.
Some of these conspiracy theories find a receptive audience at home. The social media hashtag “American’s Ft. Detrick, ‘started by the Communist Youth League, was viewed at least 1.4 billion times last week after a State Department spokesman requested a WHO investigation into the biological weapons laboratory in Maryland.
“Its purpose is to shift the blame of wrongdoing by (the) Chinese government in the early days of the pandemic to US conspiracy,” Fang Shimin, a now-based American author, confessed to falsifying. and exposed other fraud in Chinese science. . “The tactic is quite successful because of the widespread anti-American sentiment in China.”
Yuan Zeng, a Chinese media expert at the University of Leeds in the UK, said the government’s stories were so widespread that even well-educated Chinese friends asked her if they were true.
His doubts and the spread of conspiracy theories could pose health risks if governments try to dispel vaccine discomfort, ‘she said:’ It’s super, super dangerous. ‘
In the latest newsletter, state media called for an investigation into the deaths of 23 elderly people in Norway after receiving the Pfizer vaccine. An anchor at CGTN, the English station of the broadcaster CCTV, and the newspaper Global Times accused the Western media of ignoring the news.
Health experts say non-vaccine-related deaths are possible during mass vaccination campaigns, and a WTO panel has concluded that the vaccine did not play a “contributing role” in the deaths in Norway.
The media coverage in the state follows a report by researchers in Brazil who found that the efficacy of a Chinese vaccine is lower than previously announced. Researchers initially said that Sinovac’s vaccine was 78% effective, but the scientists revised it to 50.4% after including mild symptomatic cases.
To Brazil news, researchers from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a government-backed think tank, reported an increase in Chinese media’s disinformation about vaccines.
Dozens of online articles on popular health and science blogs and elsewhere have extensively investigated questions about the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine, based on an op-ed published in the British Medical Journal this month that leaves questions about its clinical trial data arise.
“It’s very embarrassing for the government,” Fang said in an email. As a result, China is trying to raise doubts about the Pfizer vaccine to save the face and promote its vaccines, he said.
Senior Chinese government officials were not ashamed to express their concern about the mRNA vaccines developed by Western medicine companies. They use a newer technology than the more traditional approach of Chinese vaccines currently in use.
In December, the director of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu, said he could not rule out negative side effects of the mRNA vaccines. He noted that it is given to healthy people for the first time, “there are concerns about safety.”
The Pfizer mRNA vaccine and another developed by Moderna have passed both animal and human trials in which they have been tested on more than 70,000 people.
The arrival of the WHO mission has brought back persistent criticism that China has allowed the virus to spread worldwide by reacting too slowly at first, even reprimanding doctors who try to warn the public. The visiting researchers will begin fieldwork this week after being released from a 14-day quarantine.
The Communist Party sees the WHO inquiry as a political risk because it draws attention to China’s response, said Jacob Wallis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
The party wants to ‘divert the attention of domestic and international audiences by twisting the narrative forward on where responsibility for the emergence of COVID-19 lies,’ Wales said.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying set the ball rolling last week by reviving earlier Chinese calls for a WHO investigation into the U.S. military laboratory.
State media have referred to scandals in the laboratory in the past, but China has not provided reliable evidence to support the coronavirus theory.
‘If America respects the truth, please open Ft. “Detrick and disclose more information about the 200 or more biolaboratories outside the US, and please allow the WTO expert group to go to the US to investigate the origin,” Hua said.
Her comments, made public by state media, have become one of the most popular topics on China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo.
China is not the only government pointing fingers. Former US President Donald Trump, who tried to divert guilt over the handling of the pandemic by his government, said last year that he had seen evidence that the virus came from a laboratory in Wuhan. Although the theory has not been definitively ruled out, many experts think it is unlikely.