TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) – Chinese state media have raised concerns about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, despite rigorous studies indicating that it is safe. A government spokesman raised the unjustified theory that the coronavirus could have left a US military lab, giving it more credence in China.
As the ruling Communist Party faces growing questions about China’s vaccines and renewed criticism of its early response to COVID-19, it backs down by encouraging conspiracy theories that some experts say could causes damage.
State media and officials sow doubts about Western vaccines and the origin of the coronavirus in an apparent attempt to deflect the attacks. Both issues are in the spotlight due to the global launch of vaccines and the recent arrival of a World Health Organization team in Wuhan, China, to investigate the origins of the virus.
Some of these conspiracy theories find a receptive audience at home. The social media hashtag “American’s Ft. Detrick ”, initiated by the Communist Youth League, was viewed at least 1.4 billion times last week after a Foreign Ministry spokesman called for a WHO investigation into the Maryland biological weapons laboratory.
“Its purpose is to shift the blame for mishandling by the Chinese (government) in the early days of the pandemic to the US conspiracy,” said Fang Shimin, a US writer known for exposing forged diplomas and other science fraud Chinese. “The tactic is quite successful because of the anti-American sentiment spread in China.”
Yuan Zeng, an expert in Chinese media at the University of Leeds in the UK, said the government’s stories had spread so widely that even well-educated Chinese friends asked her if they could be true.
Inflammation of doubts and the spread of conspiracy theories could add risks to public health as governments try to eradicate concerns about vaccines, she said, “This is super, super dangerous.”
In the latest rescue, state media have called for an investigation into the deaths of 23 elderly people in Norway after receiving the Pfizer vaccine. An anchor on the CGTN, the English-language station of the state broadcaster CCTV and the Global Times newspaper accused the Western media of ignoring the news.
Health experts say non-vaccine-related deaths are possible during mass vaccination campaigns, and a WHO group has concluded that the vaccine did not play a “contributing role” in deaths in Norway.
State media coverage followed a report by researchers in Brazil who found the effectiveness of a Chinese vaccine lower than previously announced. The researchers initially said that the Sinovac vaccine is 78% effective, but scientists have revised it to 50.4% after including some symptomatic cases.
After Brazil Researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a government-backed think tank, reported that they had seen an increase in Chinese media misinformation about vaccines.
Dozens of online articles on popular health and science blogs and elsewhere have explored questions about the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine extensively, based on an opinion published this month in the British Medical Journal that raised questions about its clinical trial data. .
“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 face and promote its vaccines, he said.
Senior Chinese government officials have not been shy in expressing concerns about mRNA vaccines developed by Western pharmaceutical companies. They use a newer technology than the more traditional approach to Chinese vaccines currently in use.
In December, the director of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu, said he could not rule out the negative side effects of mRNA vaccines. Noting that this is the first time they have been given to healthy people, he said, “there are safety issues.”
The Pfizer mRNA vaccine and another developed by Moderna have passed on both animals and human studies in which more than 70,000 people have been tested.
WHO’s arrival the mission brought back persistent criticism that China had allowed the virus to spread globally, reacting too slowly at first, even reprimanding doctors who tried to warn the public. 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 focuses on China’s response, said Jacob Wallis, a senior analyst at the Australian Institute for Strategic Policy.
The party wants to “distract the attention of the domestic and international public by preventively distorting the narrative in which the responsibility for the emergence of COVID-19 lies,” Wallis said.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying put the ball into circulation last week by relaunching previous Chinese requests for a WHO investigation into the US military laboratory.
State media reported past scandals in the lab, but China did not provide reliable evidence to support the coronavirus theory.
“If America respects the truth, then please open Ft. Detrick and make public more information about the 200 or more bio-laboratories outside the US and please allow the WHO expert group to go to the US to investigate the origins, ”said Hua.
Her comments, published by the state media, have become one of the most popular topics on Chinese, such as Sina Weibo’s Twitter.
China is not the only government pointing the finger. Former US President Donald Trump, who was trying to deflect the blame for the government’s handling of the pandemic, said last year that he saw evidence that the virus came from a laboratory in Wuhan. Although this theory has not been definitively ruled out, many experts consider it unlikely.