According to a report, China raises fears about the safety of Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot to deviate from condemnatory studies questioning the effectiveness of its own vaccine.
State media have increased coverage of unfounded security fears, accusing Western media of ignoring the deaths of 23 elderly people recently inoculated in Norway, even after officials ruled that the vaccine had no “contributing role.” , told the Associated Press.
The focus on the Pfizer vaccine came when a study in Brazil showed that China’s Sinovac vaccine was only 50% effective, despite claiming it was almost 80% 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 published.
The director of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu, helped spread the fears and insisted 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 spread so much that even well-educated Chinese friends asked him if they could be true.
Conspiracy theories probably only increase discomfort over vaccines, making misinformation “super, super dangerous,” Yuan said.
Chinese officials have also propelled a savage and baseless conspiracy that the pandemic originated in a military laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland, deviating from the fact that World Health Organization scientists are currently at the epicenter. initial, Wuhan, to investigate its true origins.
The social media hashtag “American’s Ft. Detrick, ”initiated by the Communist Youth League, was seen at least 1.4 billion times last week, the AP said.
“Its purpose is to shift the blame for the Chinese government’s mishandling (the early days of the pandemic) to the U.S. conspiracy,” said Fang Shimin, an American writer known for exposing false credentials and other frauds in the US. Chinese science. wiring service.
“The tactic is quite successful because of the widespread anti-American sentiment in China.”
With publishing cables