Analysis: China Unleashed Retaliation Over Reports on Efficacy of One of Its Vaccines

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Ghosts everywhere. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan, Hubei, to this day, Xi Jinping’s regime believes there is an international campaign to discredit the global economic giant. That is the argument used to justify the diplomatic hostility they have shown throughout 2020 and which seems to be ongoing this year. Now this ghost emerges in Latin America. More specifically in Brazil.

It occurred after Brazilian health and scientific officials reported that the Chinese-made Coronavac vaccine proved 50.38% effective, far below other Western vaccines and what had been previously reported in China. This was announced last January 12th by São Paulo’s Butantan Institute -one of the most prestigious in the country- when applying for the vaccine’s emergency use authorization.

However, the report infuriated Beijing. The president of the Sinovac laboratory, Yin Weidong, immediately stated that the antidote was highly effective, thereby challenging the Brazilian test. Yin argued that trials in Brazil had found it to be 100% effective in preventing severe cases of COVID-19 and that the company was expanding its production capacity to meet domestic and foreign demand.

Notwithstanding these efforts, the Asian country’s leadership intended to restore “honor” to its vaccine. It found no better way than to deploy its “Wolf Warrior diplomacy”, i. e. to attack its rivals. In this case, other vaccines and the companies behind them. It is particularly striking given that Xi Jinping had previously called for “solidarity and cooperation” among the world’s nations to secure vaccines for everyone.

Chinese diplomacy and the propaganda machine targeted Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. It began by claiming that the Chinese vaccines were easier to store, distribute and administer than others made in the United States and Europe. And it insisted that its vaccines are around 80 percent effective. The figures are unclear: according to Turkey, the CoronaVac is 91.25 % effective; according to Indonesia, 65.3%; and according to China, 78% effective. No one knows what the real number is.

Some countries which had pre-purchased the doses requested Sinovac for additional data and suspended shipments for the time being. However, vaccine data is under the control of the Beijing regime. What documents will be sent to countries looking for assurances on Chinese vaccines remains a mystery.

Meanwhile, Xi Jinping’s officials are starting to attack the West and its media. One of their spokesmen is the Global Times’ editor-in-chief, Hu Xinjin. The media outlet is a body of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). “If you look at the websites of major U.S. and Western media, virtually all the news you read about the Chinese-made vaccine is negative. The press wants to destroy the Chinese vaccine’s reputation, hoping that the world will wait for Pfizer and other US and Western companies to produce surplus vaccines and finally be immunized,” Hu said. Victimization is one of the tools the regime uses to ignite nationalism among its followers.

“Hu has led the way in defending Chinese-produced vaccines, not by establishing their efficacy, but by trying to topple the reputation of other candidates, particularly the ones produced by American Pfizer,” said CNN analyst James Griffiths.

The CCP newspaper columnist also wrote an editorial in which he accused the Western media of failing to publish anything about the deaths in Norway that supposedly resulted from immunization with the Pfizer doses.

However, following an internal investigation, Norwegian officials established that there was no link between the deaths and vaccination of the elderly. “All these patients had serious underlying diseases,” said Steinar Madsen, medical director of the Norwegian Medicines Agency. “We can’t say that people are dying because of the vaccine. We can say that it may be a coincidence. It is difficult to prove that the vaccine is the direct cause.”

China’s state-run CGTN TV network took it upon itself to taint Western vaccines and accuse European, US and international media of withholding information about what was happening in Norway. One of the main instigators of accusations against Pfizer was one of Beijing’s top Foreign Ministry spokespersons, Xhao Lijian. He used Twitter to share a dozen messages from anchor Liu Xin.

Liu was outraged by what he believed was insufficient coverage of the deaths in Norway and others in Germany. He directly accused the media, international news agencies and Pfizer of being behind the campaign and the alleged cover-up. One of the tweets said, “It cannot be independently verified, but it is worrying: ten deaths in Germany a few days after getting the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines”. Strange for a journalist to provide information while acknowledging it has not been verified. The Beijing Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson retweeted the reckless post.

“Did any of the major American or European media cover the story? Just think if it was found that 13 people had died from Chinese-made vaccines, it would have made headlines everywhere,” Liu was again outraged, a sentiment shared by Xhao and his nearly 900,000 followers.

According to the CNN analyst Griffiths, news about deaths and severe reactions from vaccination should be taken responsibly by the media. Moreover, the news should be confirmed before being published. “Journalists, be it in China, the United States, or anywhere else in the world, have a very good reason not to rush to report on alleged vaccine-related deaths. In fact, some media have been criticized for overreporting allergic reactions to vaccines or reporting the deaths of recently vaccinated people with no evidence of any link to the shot,” said Griffiths. Such self-criticism came from the free press, not state-run.

Griffiths also quoted an expert in the field. Derek Lowe is a pharmaceutical industry expert. He recently wrote that “if you take 10 million people, you would expect to see about 14,000 deaths from heart attacks, strokes, cancer and other common causes of death over the next two months.”

“While articles about allergic reactions and vaccine-related deaths may place the issue in the proper context, it is often difficult for headlines to do so. This creates the risk that people will only see that there have been deaths and be under the mistaken impression that coronavirus vaccines are dangerous,” the North American news network analyst pointed out.

Source: infobae