According to a report, China is fueling fears about the safety of Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot to deflect from damning studies questioning the effectiveness of its own vaccine.
State media has ramped up coverage of unfounded security fears, accusing Western media of ignoring the deaths of 23 recently vaccinated seniors in Norway, even after officials ruled the vaccine did not play a “contributory role,” according to the Associated Press.
The focus on Pfizer’s vaccine came when a study in Brazil showed that the Chinese vaccine, Sinovac, was only 50 percent effective, despite claims that it was nearly 80 percent effective.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a government-backed think tank, reported that Chinese media disinformation about vaccines intensified immediately after the study’s publication.
The director of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu, helped spread fears and insisted that “there are safety concerns” with mRNA vaccines developed by both Pfizer and Moderna.
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.
The conspiracy theories probably only add to the unease about vaccines – making the disinformation “super, super dangerous,” Yuan said.
Chinese officials have also pushed a wild, baseless conspiracy that the pandemic originated in a military laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, departing from the fact that World Health Organization scientists are currently in the original epicenter, Wuhan, to investigate the to investigate its true origin.
The social media hashtag “American’s Ft. Detrick,” started by the Communist Youth League, was viewed at least 1.4 billion times last week, the AP said.
“The goal is to shift the blame from misuse by (the) Chinese government in the early days of the pandemic to US conspiracy,” said Fang Shimin, an American writer known for denouncing forged diplomas and other fraud in Chinese science. wire service.
“The tactic is quite successful because of the widespread anti-American sentiment in China.”
With pole wires