TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) – Chinese state media has sparked concerns about Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, despite rigorous studies indicating it is safe. A government spokesman has put forward the baseless theory that the coronavirus could have emerged from a US military laboratory, giving it more credibility in China.
As the ruling Communist Party increasingly questions China’s vaccines and renewed criticism of its early COVID-19 response, it strikes back by encouraging conspiracy theories that some experts say could do harm.
State media and officials are raising doubts about Western vaccines and the origin of the coronavirus in an apparent effort to fend off the attacks. Both issues are in the spotlight due to the global rollout of vaccines and the recent arrival of a World Health Organization team in Wuhan, China, to investigate the origin of the virus.
Some of these conspiracy theories find receptive audiences 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 called for a WHO investigation into the biological laboratory. weapons in Maryland.
“The goal is to shift the blame from assault by (the) Chinese government in the early days of the pandemic to US conspiracy,” said Fang Shimin, a now US-based writer known for uncovering forged diplomas. and other fraud in Chinese science. . “The tactic is quite successful because of the widespread anti-American sentiment in China.”
Yuan Zeng, an expert on Chinese media at the University of Leeds in Britain, said the government’s stories are so widespread that even educated Chinese friends have asked her if they could be true.
Raising doubts and spreading conspiracy theories could add to public health risks as governments try to dispel unease about vaccines, she said, saying, “That’s super, super dangerous.”
In the latest salvo, state media called for an investigation into the deaths of 23 elderly people in Norway after they received the Pfizer vaccine. An anchor at CGTN, the English-language channel of the state broadcaster CCTV, and the Global Times newspaper accused Western media of ignoring the news.
Health experts say that deaths unrelated to the vaccine are possible during massive vaccination campaigns, and a WHO panel has concluded that the vaccine did not play a “contributory role” in the deaths in Norway.
Coverage in the state media followed a report by researchers in Brazil who found the effectiveness of a Chinese vaccine to be lower than previously announced. Researchers initially said Sinovac’s vaccine is 78% effective, but the scientists revised that to 50.4% after including mildly symptomatic cases.
After the Brazil news, researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a government-backed think tank, reported that Chinese media misinformation about vaccines is on the rise.
Dozens of online articles on popular health and science blogs and elsewhere have extensively explored questions about the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine, based on an opinion piece published this month in the British Medical Journal that raises questions about clinical trial data .
“It’s very embarrassing” for the government, Fang said in an email. As a result, China is trying to question the Pfizer vaccine to save face and promote its vaccines, he said.
Senior Chinese government officials have not been shy about voicing concerns about the mRNA vaccines being developed by Western pharmaceutical companies. They use newer technology than the more traditional approach to the Chinese vaccines currently in use.
In December, the director of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu, said he cannot rule out the negative side effects of the mRNA vaccines. He noted that this is the first time they have been given to healthy people and said, “There are safety concerns.”
The Pfizer mRNA vaccine and another developed by Moderna have passed both animal and human trials, testing them on more than 70,000 people.
The arrival of the WHO mission has generated stubborn criticism that China has allowed the virus to spread worldwide by being too slow to respond at first and even reprimanding doctors who tried to warn the public. The visiting investigators will begin fieldwork this week after being released from a 14-day quarantine.
The Communist Party views the WHO investigation 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 aims to “distract the domestic and international public by preemptively twisting the narrative about where responsibility lies for the rise of COVID-19,” said Wallis.
State Department spokeswoman Hua Chunying got the ball rolling last week by reviving earlier Chinese calls for a WHO investigation into the US military laboratory.
State media has referred to past scandals in the lab, but China has not provided reliable evidence to support the coronavirus theory.
If America respects the truth, please ask Ft. Detrick and disclose more information about the 200 or more biolabs outside the US, and allow the WHO expert group to go to the US to investigate the origins, ”said Hua.
Her comments, published by state media, became one of the most popular topics on the Chinese Twitter-like Sina Weibo.
China is not the only government to point the finger. Former US President Donald Trump, who tried to avert blame for his administration’s handling of the pandemic, said last year he had seen the virus coming from a laboratory in Wuhan. While that theory has not been definitively ruled out, many experts believe it is unlikely.