China is harboring fears about the safety of Pfizer’s COVID-19 injection to avoid studies that question the effectiveness of its own vaccine, according to a report.
State media increased coverage of unfounded security fears, accusing Western media of ignoring the deaths of 23 elderly people recently inoculated in Norway, even after authorities decided that the vaccine does not play a “contributory role,” the Associated Press said.
The focus on the Pfizer vaccine came when a study in Brazil showed that China’s vaccine, Sinovac, was only 50 percent effective, despite claims that it was almost 80 percent effective.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a government-backed think tank, reported seeing an increase in Chinese media misinformation about vaccines immediately after the study was released.
The director of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu, helped spread fears, insisting that “there are safety issues” with mRNA vaccines developed by both Pfizer and Moderna.
Yuan Zeng, a Chinese media expert at the University of Leeds in Britain, said the government’s stories had spread so widely that even well-mannered Chinese friends asked him if they could be true.
Conspiracy theories are likely to only increase discomfort about vaccines – making misinformation “super, super dangerous,” said Yuan.
Chinese authorities have also promoted a wild and baseless conspiracy that the pandemic originated in a military laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland, deflecting the fact that World Health Organization scientists are currently at the initial epicenter, Wuhan, to investigate their true origins.
The social media hashtag “American’s Ft. Detrick”, started by the Communist Youth League, was seen at least 1.4 billion times in the past week, the AP said.
“Its aim is to shift the blame for the Chinese government’s mishandling in the early days of the pandemic to the US conspiracy,” said Fang Shimin, an American writer known for exposing fake degrees and other fraud in Chinese science. news service.
“The tactic is successful because of widespread anti-American sentiment in China.”
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