Chinese state media raised questions about Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine and whether it could be lethal to older people. A government spokesman suggests the coronavirus may have come from a U.S. military laboratory.
While the government’s Communist Party faces growing questions about China’s vaccines and renewed criticism of its initial response to COVID, it is responding by encouraging marginal theories that some experts say can cause harm.
State media and officials are sowing doubts about Western vaccines and the origin of the coronavirus in an apparent attempt to deflect the attacks. Both issues are in the spotlight because of the ongoing distribution of vaccines worldwide and the recent arrival of a WHO team in Wuhan, China, to investigate the origins of the virus.
While marginal theories may be surprising abroad, efforts are also aimed at a more receptive domestic audience. The social media hashtag “American’s Ft. Detrick”, started by the Communist Youth League, was seen at least 1.4 billion times last week after a Foreign Ministry spokesman called for a WHO investigation into the biological weapons laboratory in Maryland.
ARCHIVE – In this January 20, 2021 archive photo, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hua Chunying, speaks during the daily press conference at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing. China is trying to spread doubts about the effectiveness of Western vaccines and the origin of the coronavirus, as a team of scientists selected by the World Health Organization is in the city where the pandemic began. (AP Photo / Liu Zheng, Archive)
“His aim is to shift the blame for the Chinese government’s mishandling in the early days of the pandemic to the U.S. conspiracy,” said Fang Shimin, a writer who now lives in the United States known for exposing fake degrees and other fraud in Chinese science. “The tactic is very successful because of widespread anti-American sentiment in China.”
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.
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Igniting doubts and spreading conspiracy theories could increase public health risks as governments try to dispel the discomfort about vaccines, she said, saying, “This is super, super dangerous.”
In the last wave, state media called for an investigation into the deaths of 23 elderly people in Norway after receiving the Pfizer vaccine. An anchorman from CGTN, the English-language station on state-owned CCTV, and the Global Times newspaper accused the Western media of ignoring the news.
ARCHIVE – In this March 19, 2020, archival photo, a biosafety protective suit to deal with viral diseases is hung in a level 4 biosafety training center at the US Army Medical Research and Development Command in Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, where scientists are working to help develop solutions to prevent, detect and treat coronavirus. China is trying to spread doubts about the effectiveness of Western vaccines and the origin of the coronavirus, as a team of scientists selected by the World Health Organization is in the city where the pandemic began. (AP Photo / Andrew Harnik, Archives)
Health experts say non-vaccine-related deaths are possible during mass vaccination campaigns, and a WHO panel concluded that the vaccine did not play a “contributory role” in deaths in Norway.
State media coverage followed a report by researchers in Brazil who found the effectiveness of a Chinese vaccine to be lower than previously announced. The researchers initially said that the Sinovac vaccine is 78% effective, but the scientists revised it to 50.4% after including the slightly symptomatic cases.
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Following news from Brazil, researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a government-backed think tank, reported seeing an increase in Chinese media misinformation about vaccines.
Dozens of articles online on popular health and science blogs and elsewhere explored questions about the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine, based on an article published this month in the British Medical Journal that raised questions about its clinical trial data.
“It is very embarrassing” for the government, Fang said by email. As a result, China is trying to raise doubts about Pfizer’s vaccine to save face and promote its vaccines, he said.
Senior Chinese government officials have not hesitated to voice 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.
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In December, the director of the Chinese Center 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 that they are being given to healthy people, he said, “there are security issues”.
The arrival of the WHO mission brought back persistent criticism that China allowed the virus to spread globally by reacting very slowly at first, even rebuking doctors who tried to alert the public. Visiting researchers will begin fieldwork this week, after being released from a 14-day quarantine.
The Communist Party sees the WHO investigation as a political risk because it focuses attention on China’s response, said Jacob Wallis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
The party wants to “distract the national and international public, pre-emptively distorting the narrative about where responsibility lies for the emergence of COVID-19,” said Wallis.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying kicked off last week, calling on the WHO to investigate the US military laboratory. The site had previously been mentioned by CGTN and other state-controlled vehicles.
“If America respects the truth, open Ft. Detrick and make public more information about 200 or more biological laboratories outside the United States and allow the WHO group of experts to go to the United States to investigate the origins,” Hua said.
His comments, released by state media, have become one of the most popular topics on Sina Weibo.
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China is not the only government to point the finger. Former President Donald Trump, trying to deflect blame for the way his government handled the pandemic, said last year that he saw evidence that the virus came from a Wuhan laboratory. Although this theory has not been definitively dismissed, many experts think it is unlikely.