They offer only whopping lies, clumsy coercion, and an amazing capacity to believe that no one will notice.
The Chinese Communist Party for months pushed absurd lies about COVID’s origins, and its most recent disinformation campaign about Western vaccines is no less ridiculous. Nevertheless, top Chinese diplomats are using public health as an issue with which they hope to get a foot in the door with the Biden administration.
The Wall Street Journal reported on the Chinese diplomatic effort this weekend, which has featured backchannel attempts to gauge the new administration’s interest in high-level meetings. In addition to working together on climate change, Beijing will ask for cooperation on the pandemic:
The Chinese side plans to propose that both sides cooperate on vaccine-certificate protocols, to verify proof of immunization, under the guidelines set by the World Health Organization. Chinese officials hope that in turn can help facilitate travel between the two countries for people who present such proof. Beijing also hopes that the two sides can talk about jointly distributing vaccines in developing countries.
China has attempted to step into a global leadership role on providing Covid-19 vaccines for developing countries, but recently suffered a setback when one of its leading inoculation candidates turned out to be significantly less effective in late-stage trials in Brazil than in early results. A risk for the U.S. is that cooperating with China could lend legitimacy to Chinese vaccines developed in a push that scientists have criticized as not transparent.
The Biden administration has thus far maintained a cool distance from these overtures, which are still in their infancy. Nonetheless, the Journal’s revelations go to show just how unbelievably brazen Beijing’s outreach is.
The idea that the CCP can position itself as a credible partner with which to fight the pandemic is plainly laughable. Its COVID conspiracy theories recently came full circle, with foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying reviving a claim that the disease actually originated in Maryland, at the U.S. army’s Fort Detrick medical research laboratory. The conspiracy theory, which has no basis in fact, was initially promoted by Hua’s colleague Zhao Lijian on Twitter last March.
Faced last week with the U.S. government’s assessment that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had come down with COVID in fall 2019, prior to the first reported cases, Hua turned the tables on Washington, demanding that it “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 with real actions.”
Now these officials and state-run media outlets are on a relentless tear against Western COVID vaccines.
In a piece about Australia’s expected approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the Global Times offered false claims. “The deaths of 23 elderly Norwegian people after receiving the vaccine have raised concern in Australia,” according to the Chinese mouthpiece. Of course, this is baseless scaremongering that ignores that these people seemed to have died of unrelated causes, suggesting instead that their deaths were caused by the vaccine.
Asked to comment on the piece during a news conference on January 20, Hua doubled down on the story, stating that it revealed the extent to which Western media show a bias for Western vaccines and one against Chinese ones.
Like the Global Times story, Hua’s comments elide the key fact here: The vaccines that have been approved in the West are simply more reliable than those offered in China. Whereas, for instance, the Pfizer vaccine is about 95 percent effective, the one offered by Sinovac works 50 percent of the time, according to Brazilian researchers.
And not only does the Chinese party-state spread its own disinformation, it goes after those who speak the truth about the pandemic. The Gazeta do Povo reports that Beijing’s ambassador to Brazil is demanding that the country’s foreign minister Ernesto Araújo, who called the coronavirus the “communist virus,” be fired or that the government otherwise issue a statement lauding Beijing’s assistance. The Chinese negotiators have made this a precondition of receiving further component materials from China that Brazil can use to manufacture the Sinovac and AstraZeneca vaccines.
The CCP’s vaccine diplomacy offers only whopping lies, clumsy coercion, and an amazing capacity to believe that no one will notice. Yet Beijing’s envoys somehow think they stand a chance of convincing their American counterparts to view them as anything other than the representatives of a regime with a complete disregard for global public health.