danger/u/
This thread is permanently archived
China Disparages US Covid Vaccines, Promotes Conspiracy Theories

| https://archive.is/GrXFD archived version to defeat paywall.

Original sauce:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/vaccines-coronavirus-china-conspiracy-theories/2021/01/20/89bd3d2a-5a2d-11eb-a849-6f9423a75ffd_story.html

By Gerry Shih

Jan. 20, 2021 at 3:20 p.m. UTC

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Europe and Australia should reject the "hasty" American vaccines linked to elderly deaths, Chinese scientists say. Western media refuses to investigate the dangers of the Pfizer-BioNTech shot, fumed a state television anchor. The coronavirus could be a plot involving former U.S. defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, suggested a state media editor. And the real origin of the virus? Perhaps the U.S. Army's Fort Detrick should be investigated, intoned a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman.

One year after the coronavirus was first widely reported in China, the country’s state media and officials are again pitching a flood of theories about its origins (not China) and which vaccines are safe (not American).

The reports, claims by officials and unchecked online speculation this month appear to be part of a renewed Chinese push to cast blame for the pandemic elsewhere and undermine public confidence in Western vaccines.

International researchers say some Chinese theories, such as cold-chain packaging carrying the virus to China, could be possible, if unlikely. And most experts say that the side effects of new vaccines — and the definitive story of how and where the pandemic emerged — indeed require further investigation.

But China’s aggressive promotion of its narratives is muddying the waters precisely when a World Health Organization team in Wuhan is seeking to investigate the virus’s origins. The drumbeat of Chinese skepticism toward Western vaccines — one a joint production between U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German biotech firm BioNTech, another from U.S. biotech company Moderna — ramped up in recent weeks as clinical data showed vaccines from Chinese pharmaceutical firms potentially lagging U.S. rivals.


“This defensiveness is all certainly against the background of the WHO investigation and a return of China to the media spotlight,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.


After Chinese officials and researchers spent months telling the public that China’s vaccines would win the global development race, Huang added, “there’s now a gap between expectation and reality that needed to be addressed, so you see this effort to disparage Western vaccines.”

Since early in the pandemic, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has avoided discussion of China’s role in the contagion and cast China as a world leader that would help others — particularly developing nations — recover. In speeches, including at the World Health Assembly, Xi has pledged that China would promote global vaccine cooperation.

In state media, the tone has been decidedly less lofty.
An Indigenous woman of the Ticuna tribe receives a Sinovac vaccine shot, in Tabatinga, state of Amazonas, Brazil, on Tuesday.

After one of China’s leading vaccine contenders, CoronaVac from Beijing-based Sinovac, made headlines last week after Brazilian researchers reported new findings that its efficacy reached only about 50 percent, several state media personalities questioned why the side effects and dangers of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine were not also scrutinized.


The nationalist Global Times newspaper ran stories that seized on the deaths of 23 elderly ­Norwegians who had taken the ­Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and quoted Chinese experts who urged countries from Norway to Australia to halt its use.


Hu Xijin, the Global Times editor, wrote this week that the Western media was “out to destroy” the reputation of Chinese vaccines and that China needed to fight back. Days later, state outlets published photos of leaders, including Indonesia’s Joko Widodo and Dubai’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, receiving Chinese vaccines.


In many ways, the Chinese rhetoric mirrors that of state media in Russia, which has touted its homegrown vaccine. Sputnik V, like the Chinese offerings, is traditionally developed with inactivated dead viruses, unlike the messenger-RNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.


For months, Russian officials such as Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct sovereign wealth fund, have suggested that mRNA-based vaccines could damage fertility. Russian state media has bemoaned how Pfizer-BioNTech’s shot has been “imposed on literally everyone.”


The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says studies on mRNA vaccine side effects are ongoing, but experts do not believe they pose a specific risk to recipients who are pregnant. Clinical trials suggest side effects of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine include fevers, chills, tiredness and headache. A tiny fraction of recipients reported severe adverse reactions, results show.


Concerns about mRNA vaccines have sometimes been voiced by the West, but in China, they have been a running theme. As U.S. firms have released early results in recent months, warnings from prominent Chinese experts have grown to a degree that has surprised observers.


George Gao, head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, recently pondered publicly whether the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines could cause cancer. Zhong Nanshan, who is considered a ­national hero for his work on the SARS and covid-19 outbreaks and sometimes speaks on behalf of the government, dismissed ­Pfizer-BioNTech’s and Moderna’s clinical trials as “very insufficient” in November. China’s vaccines, Zhong added, “are developed with rigor.”


Dali Yang, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who researches China’s health system, said that he was surprised a prominent health official like Gao would cast doubt on U.S. vaccines but that it was not clear whether such comments represented a concerted government strategy. Chinese factories, after all, have been contracted to produce millions of doses of ­Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine, and it’s still possible that China could buy the vaccine to inoculate elderly citizens because the Chinese vaccines have not been tested on people over 59, he said.


“If they really played this up, they could make it very difficult for themselves,” Yang said.


The Chinese experts’ warnings have been mild compared with state and influential social media, where ominous reports and theories have gained traction.


The Chinese Internet lit up this month after Jin Canrong, a foreign policy adviser to the government, posted an essay by Xiong Lei, a senior state media editor, pointing out that Rumsfeld, through his shareholding as the former chairman of Gilead Sciences, has profited from Gilead selling antiviral drugs for outbreaks that have struck China.


“It’s not right that we ignore this,” Xiong wrote. “The United States is not without a record of biological warfare.”
People fill forms before receiving vaccines at a vaccination site in Shanghai on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying pushed speculation about a U.S. Army biological warfare program. “If the United States truly respects facts, it should open the biological lab at Fort Detrick, give more transparency to issues like its 200-plus overseas bio labs, invite WHO experts to conduct origin-tracing in the United States, and respond to the ­concerns from the international community,” she said in a briefing.


Some government agencies have appeared happy to stoke nationalism. Officials in Changzhou, in eastern China, claimed last month that a survey they conducted showed that 78 percent of respondents would prefer to take a Chinese vaccine. Just 7 percent said they would prefer a foreign one.


In the minority are those who have tried to lower the temperature.


Zhou Yebin, a senior researcher at Chicago-based AbbVie who has a large following in China as a science writer, urged Chinese to stop viewing the vaccine race as a “zero-sum game” and worrying whether the Chinese vaccines can compete with Western options. At a forum this week, the chief of Shanghai’s pandemic response, Zhang Wenhong, was asked whether Chinese should opt for a U.S. or Chinese vaccine.
Zhang dismissed the question and said he only wants to get 80 percent of the population inoculated. “It’s all good as long as you get it,” he said.



Jennifer Huang Bouey, a ­Peking University-trained epidemiologist who is now a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corp. in Washington, said that in the past week she has anecdotally observed an uptick even in her WeChat circles — comprising highly educated Chinese researchers — of articles, including one on the British Medical Journal’s website, questioning the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine’s efficacy.


Some Chinese researchers felt that Chinese vaccines were being unfairly criticized, Bouey said.


“So many people are watching China’s push to reach global standards, and it’s so high-stakes,” she said. “The pushback and generally the negative views from Western countries make them very insecure.”


Isabelle Khurshudyan in Moscow contributed to this report.


| First of all, how the fuck were you able to write all that!?

Second, wow thats low, all vaccines were rushed wtf is china even complaining about?


| Almost sounds like China wants to ride on the Western economy-destroying pandemic wave a little longer.
They're probably vaccinating their own like crazy.


| I don't really like western propaganda so not gonna read it. I was into these oh China evil conspiracy stories but after taking a step back and looking at the big picture I've come to realize that the USA is the number 1 source of propaganda and I'm better off just getting my news from any country but it unless I want to know something stupid like Kim Kardashians latest measurements which somehow makes it on these reputable news sources.


| >>732675 ah willfull ignorance, beautiful


| >>732675 Yeah… used to think that until I lived in China. China is definitely #1 for propaganda. Like, Xi Jinping thought plastered on the walls of every classroom. WaPo IS propaganda for Jeff Bezos's wealth, but China IS as ridiculous as the article describes.


| >>732733 you know somthing wrong when they ban pooh bear just because of a meme


| China's propaganda remains mostly internal, while the USA's propaganda is aimed at the whole world. Better or worse, that's another question.


| >>732739 You sure about that? Xinhua video billboard in Times Square, China Daily ads disguised as a regular news page in the New York Times, CGTN videos all over the web, Tiktok, the hundreds of thousands of Wumao turning public discussion sites into cancer. not to mention every major company and celebrity regurgitating anti-democracy in HK and Taiwan belonging to PRC shit.

All that being said, the propaganda is not very effective. It mostly attracts Chinese diaspora


| >>732739 nah chine has as much influence as the US has.


| And yet nobody freaks out when the US produces worldwide-known movies showing the US as the good guys, and everyone else as the bad ones, to the point it became normal for many countries outside the US.


| >>732781 why would a country portray themselves as the bad guy?


| >>732816
g/u/rl's got a point, lmao.

And China especially is infamous for wanting to make themselves look good in the eyes of everyone else. They hate being seen as weak- just as every other superpower.


| >>732371

Mods are Gods.


| >>732856 no, whoever keeps those servers are, mods are just angels that protect and hold the integrity of the plataform


| I think in terms of quantity, America is probably leading the propaganda race. America's propaganda machine is definitely less centralized, though. >>732781 mentions American movies, but those aren't productions of the government (I hope). Similarly, the expansion of the American megacorps seems to be a lot less government driven and supported than Tencent does.

In either case both are expansive and more importantly unideal. It'd be a lot easier to appreciate European expansion.


| >>733013 how about no propapanda


| >>733016 that would also be good


| You shouldn't even take the normal vaccine, by anyone - it's not a conspiracy, it's good advice - who even knows the long side effects?


| >>733217 That's not good advice, that's retarded. Even if you assume that science has no clue about what it is doing (which is quite a stupid assumption already), that logic doesn't hold because there are many things that you don't care about, that are much riskier than any "dangerous" vaccine.
And it is conspiracy theory, because it's about considering that science doesn't do its job and is a fraud


| >>733264 I belive the vaccines are safe, but even I can understand why even pro vaxxers are a bit skeptic, the covid vaccine was made very fast.

But from what we have seen the only problem that could happen are normal alergic reactions that can easely be treated so really there isnt much risk behind it. Thats even Why I think the covid vaccines are safe.


| >>733267 It was fast because the whole process was sped up through optimisations and high budgets.. But it is irrational to doubt the vaccine, because if scientists weren't doing their job properly, they wouldn't have waited for covid to do a crappy job


| So you don't remember when the WHO said there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission and Dr. Fauci said people don't need to wear mask? Of course skepticism of the current vaccines is justified. I'm not anti-vacc, I'm just skeptical of the corporations behind them


| >>733668 That is being anti-vax, rejecting science out of fear. Usually "corporations" are called "Big Pharma" in such theories.
The WHO, and a random guy even more, aren't science. Like it or not but science works, and corporations have absolutely no interest into pushing a crappy vaccine to be sold - and they couldn't if they wanted.
Also, I don't remember the WHO saying such a thing, but "no evidence" means what it means, I don't see what is the problem here.


| >>733723 nah, having doubt is not rejecting science, I trust the vaccine, you trust the vaccine, but why cant you understand why some people dont trust the covid vaccine?

Not all vaccines,just the covid one, when I get the opportunity to take it I will, but I understand the people who are imesure about it, 2020 was harsher than usual, it exposer the filth in the respectable institutions and people are very broken just like their trust


| Amd to clear something, science is not the word of god, its yrs of experimenting and sharing knowledge. Science is questioning and looking for the answer, it is very changable, very fluid and we constantly need to re work things to understand them better.

The Covid vaccine was rushed, no doubt about it, it was for a new and risky variation of a virus that wasnt that well known and had no prior vaccines, but yes, you cant sell a defective product and thats the reason I trust it


| >>733745 Under the PREP Act, Pfizer and Moderna are immune from liability. If the vaccine works, they make money, if it doesn't work they will claim there's a new strain of the virus and still make money. Yeah I support the scientific method but there's a lot of human bullshit that gets muddled into the end result of science.


| >>733723 The WHO Jan 14 "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in Wuhan, China." Seems like a normal response at the time except before this Taiwan already provided evidence of transmission and WHO ignored it to appease China. Take the vaccine but read up on it to make sure the efficacy rate is genuine for your demographic.


| >>733013 tagging this post for incredible reasonability

Total number of posts: 29, last modified on: Tue Jan 1 00:00:00 1611684701

This thread is permanently archived