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Nobody in China trusts Chinese vaccines, so why does Carrie Lam trust them?|Kevin Carrico

蘋果日報 2020/12/18 10:03


Another week brings another incomprehensible misstep by the Carrie Lam regime. On the one hand, in the rollout of Hong Kong’s COVID vaccination plan, I have been somewhat surprised by Lam’s aggressive cheerleading for the still unverified Chinese-made Sinovac vaccine. On the other hand, deep down inside, I know that such behavior is only to be expected from Lam, so I should not be surprised.
Before we get into the details, I should first clarify: don’t worry, I’m not an anti-vaccine guy. I love a good vaccine, and the second that I can get a COVID vaccine confirmed by the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration, I will get it without a second thought.
My enthusiasm for vaccines, however, has its limits. If some guy in a dark alley whispered, “hey, want a vaccine?,” I probably would not follow him down that alley. Call me conservative, but I prefer to have my vaccines go through those old-fashioned clinical trials and all that good stuff.
Carrie Lam, however, is clearly much more progressive than me on such matters: Sinovac Biotech has not yet published data on its final Phase Three clinical trials, but has already received a vote of confidence from the Lam regime, in the form of an advance purchase of 7.5 million doses.
Some researchers have raised questions over whether the clinical trials overseen by Sinovac meet the minimum standards for transparency. Questions have also been raised about how and indeed even if the Chinese authorities are keeping track of potential adverse events that have emerged since the emergency use vaccination program began operation there in July.
Confidence in Sinovac as a whole is not strengthened by news that its CEO Yin Weidong was involved in a bribery scandal to accelerate regulators’ approval of vaccines a decade ago. The regulator involved was sent to prison, but Yin remains at the helm of Sinovac, unphased by the scandal. And just three years ago, Sinovac was again using bribes in red packets to promote its vaccines in Guangdong. Sinovac is basically the guy in the dark alley with a vaccine in one hand and a red packet in the other: Sketchyvac.
These concerns focusing specifically on Sinovac, its business model, and the transparency of its trials are only further compounded by the broader concerns about Chinese-made vaccines in general.
I can already hear the frenzied response: Chinese-made vaccines in general? Pure, discriminatory conjecture, some will declare.
Yet concerns about Chinese-made vaccines are not pure conjecture: China has had publicly acknowledged tainted vaccine scandals as recently as 2018 that have ruined countless young children’s lives. We could go over the numbers, but in doing so we risk losing sight of the depth of personal tragedy: one mother in Guangdong has shared her experience of her daughter’s tainted hepatitis vaccine with RFA. The site of her daughter’s injection swelled up to the size of an egg and turned black. Her daughter, just months old, went pale, began foaming at the mouth, and went into shock. Today, her daughter suffers delayed cognitive development. This is, we must remember, just one experience among thousands of others.
As a result of these types of experiences, let me let you all in on a little secret: no one is more concerned about Chinese vaccines than Chinese people, precisely because they are the ones forced to bear the consequences of the country’s hyper-charged business environment and deeply lacking regulatory environment.
Anyone who lives in Hong Kong has undoubtedly seen the endless lines of people who are obviously not locals awaiting vaccinations. As with milk powder and other essential goods, Hong Kong’s system, a legacy of its distinct history unpolluted by CCP(Chinese Communist Party) rule before 1997, has provided a rare site of reassurance for people living under CCP rule fearing for their children’s safety. These people would think that anyone in Hong Kong lining up for the Sinovac vaccine was a total idiot.
Brushing all of these very real issues aside, however, Carrie Lam has bluntly declared that concerns about Sinovac are nothing but “malicious rumors” by people who are trying to “politicize” health.
As a general rule, anytime a CCP official says that something “should not be politicized,” it is safe to assume that the Party has already politicized it beyond recognition. This is true of the Olympics, true of trade disputes, and of course it is true of COVID-19.
At first Peking suppressed news of the virus in the service of its false stability, then it decried as “discriminatory” global attempts to close borders to stop the spread of the virus, then it promoted a name that detached the virus from its place of origin before in turn floating baseless conspiracy theories about its origins, all while delaying and suppressing any even remotely transparent investigation into the emergence of this tragedy.
In this extremely politicized context, vaccine development could not be more thoroughly politicized. Precisely because the People’s Republic of China and its failed political system were the source of this epidemic, the CCP is eager to obtain redemption for the tragedy that it has inflicted on the world by providing a cure.
Yet there is little taste for Sinovac or Sinopharm vaccines in the developed world. In its endless imaginary contest for dominance with the United States, the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine relative to the unproven Sinovac offering is deeply embarrassing. In this context, the city of Hong Kong, whose government serves not its own people but rather Peking, provides an ideal captive developed market for these vaccines to gain face.
The decision to source Sinovac vaccines before they have even been confirmed is thus at once both shocking and unsurprising because it reflects the dilemma in which the people of Hong Kong find themselves today within China. Peking can feel a surge of confidence that its vaccine has been given the green light by the Hong Kong government, a fact that it can use for global marketing. Meanwhile Carrie Lam and her regime can again, in this confirmation, prove their patriotic bona fides.
As with so many scenarios in Hong Kong’s recent history, the only people who lose are local residents, who can only watch in shock as a non-representative government engaged in the politicization of everything from education to the law to health admonishes them for “politicizing health” simply for raising commonsense concerns about sketchy vaccines.
The Hong Kong people deserve a better, more accountable vaccine program to deal with this epidemic; to get to the root of the problem, the Hong Kong people deserve a better, more accountable government.
(Kevin Carrico, Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University)
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