Chinese companies are shipping their vaccines against COVID-19 around the world. But that doesn’t mean the recipients are using them:
Last month, a shipment of Sinovac coronavirus vaccines arrived without fanfare in Singapore from China.
Today, the vaccines sit unused in a storage facility. The wealthy city-state is moving ahead with Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna for its coronavirus immunization program, with officials saying Sinovac needs to provide more data before they will consider rolling out its doses.
The case highlights the limitations of Beijing’s vaccine diplomacy. China’s lack of transparency in its clinical trials has hurt public confidence, even as national leaders from Indonesia to Sierra Leone have gotten the shots to rally their populations to do the same.
China’s coronavirus vaccine makers Sinovac and Sinopharm were among the earliest in the world to begin clinical trials last year. It remains unclear why they still have not published the data from the studies, even after dozens of governments have greenlighted their vaccines for emergency use.
[…]
Vaccine makers usually release details of their Phase 3 clinical trials in peer-reviewed journals before the vaccines gain regulatory approval. Pfizer and Moderna published theirs in The New England Journal of Medicine in December.
Sinopharm and Sinovac have self-reported some key results, but have not published the underlying data in a journal, which would require vetting by third-party experts.
Chinese government officials and industry executives have largely deflected questions about when they will release the data. In an interview with state-run tabloid Global Times this month, Shao Yiming, a vaccine expert with China’s CDC, claimed that the countries where Sinovac and Sinopharm ran trials — including Brazil and the UAE — must be the ones to release it.
“Whether to release the clinical trial data, when and how, must be decided by the foreign institutions,” said Shao. “China has no power to decide.”
At a Beijing news conference on March 15, health regulators ignored a question on when data will be released, according to the transcript. Sinopharm and Sinovac executives also have not addressed the question.
It would be a great thing for the world if the Sinopharm and Sinovac products are safe and effective. Same thing with Russia’s Sputnik V, or other vaccines being developed in authoritarian countries. If a medical procedure or product actually works, I am not going to turn it down because I don’t like the government that commissioned it.
But this shows where dictatorships are at an advantage and at a marked disadvantage compared to democratic countries. With wealthier nations buying up proven vaccines from Pfizer and other established drug companies, China and Russia have been able to swoop in and supply products to developing countries that desperately need them. It should be a major propaganda victory for Putin and Xi.
The thing is, that can send their vaccines around the world. Getting the recipients to actually trust them is much harder.
The Kremlin said on Tuesday it had deliberately decided it would not reveal the name of the Russian-made vaccine which President Vladimir Putin is due to take later on Tuesday.
“We are deliberately not saying which shot the president will get, noting that all three Russian (-made) vaccines are absolutely reliable and effective,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
He said Putin, who announced his intention to get vaccinated a day earlier, would probably be vaccinated in the evening and would receive one of the three Russian-made shots.
Peskov said Putin had already done a lot to promote Russian-made vaccines, the most famous of which is Sputnik V. Moscow has also given emergency approval to two other domestic vaccines, EpiVacCorona and CoviVac.
Peskov said that Putin did not like the idea of being vaccinated on camera.
If you spend any time on Reddit, you’re probably familiar with /r/amItheasshole, where people post stories (of questionable veracity) and ask which side is at fault. People answer with the applicable acronym: YTA (you’re the asshole), NTA (you’re not the asshole), NAH (no assholes here, where everyone involved kind of has a point) and ESH (everyone sucks here).
It’s rare that you come across a news story in which ESH, but I think this one definitely applies:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he’s fed up with “Quebec bashing” following controversial remarks from a University of Ottawa professor.
At a press conference announcing broadband internet funding Monday, Trudeau and Quebec Premier Francois Legault slammed online comments from law professor Amir Attaran, who claims the province is led by “a white supremacist government” and too tolerant of racism.
“Enough of the Quebec bashing,” Trudeau said in French.
“This is unacceptable,” Legault added in French, stating he was “disappointed” the university’s president opted not to condemn Attaran’s posts more vehemently.
University of Ottawa president Jacques Fremont said in a letter to Parti Quebecois Leader Paul Saint-Pierre Plamondon on Sunday that the institution does not share Attaran’s opinions, but that they were posted on his personal Twitter account and thus not subject to sanction, as comments uttered in the classroom might be.
[…]
Plamondon had asked for an apology from the university following recent remarks from Attaran, whose provocative Twitter posts have sparked numerous social media dust-ups in recent days.
He has called Quebec’s culture racist, dubbing the province the “#AlabamaOfTheNorth” and accusing its nurses of “medical lynching” in regard to Joyce Echaquan, a 37-year-old Indigenous woman who died in a Quebec hospital in 2020.
“The nation of Quebec is led by a white supremacist government,” Attaran said in a Twitter post Sunday.
His scathing posts aren’t limited to a single province. Attaran also referred to the RCMP as the “Royal Canadian Mounted Pigs” in a recent post on an independent commission’s finding that Mounties dealt in a discriminatory manner with the family of Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old First Nations man who was fatally shot by Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley.
Let’s review the major players:
if you’re remotely familiar with Canadian political Twitter, you know Amir Attaran is a notorious troll who constantly insults everyone and everything. He last gained notoriety when he said Alberta shouldn’t get help from the federal government in fighting COVID-19. (Who does he think he is, Keith Olbermann?) People like this are why the “mute” button was invented.
Quebec really has introduced some policies which are kind of racist, most infamously its ban on civil servants wearing religious symbols. Technically it is aimed at members of all faiths, wink wink, but there’s no doubt about which religious group is the real target. A rule of Canadian politics: Quebec is what people accuse Alberta of being.
Prime Minister Boyfriend is so woke he basically accuses his own government of committing genocide against Canada’s First Nations. But when it comes to his home province, he is shocked, shocked, to see someone accusing it of racism. It’s almost like he doesn’t always live up to his own standards, if you can believe such a thing. (To be fair, the Leader of the Opposition has also issued his own French-language tweet ensuring us that he is outraged someone would dare suggest that Quebeckers are racist.)
Sometimes there are no good guys. Especially on Twitter. And especially in politics.
Monday’s gun massacre at a Boulder, Colorado supermarket wasn’t America’s second mass shooting in a week.
Tuesday, March 16 - Atlanta, Georgia: Eight people, including six Asian women, were killed when a White gunman stormed three spas, police said.
Wednesday, March 17 - Stockton, California: Five people who were preparing a vigil in Stockton, in California's Central Valley, were shot in a drive-by shooting, the San Joaquin Sheriff's Department said. None had life-threatening injuries.
Thursday, March 18 - Gresham, Oregon: Four victims were taken to the hospital after a shooting in the city east of Portland, police said in an initial report.
Saturday, March 20 - Houston: Five people were shot after a disturbance inside a club, according to police. One was in critical condition after being shot in the neck, the rest were in stable condition, according to CNN affiliate KPRC.
Saturday, March 20 - Dallas: Eight people were shot by an unknown assailant, one of whom died, according to police.
Saturday, March 20 - Philadelphia: One person was killed and another five were injured during a shooting at an illegal party, CNN affiliate KYW reported. "There were at least 150 people in there that fled and believed they had to flee for their lives," Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said.
Monday, March 22 -Boulder, Colorado: Ten people, including a Boulder police officer, were killed in a shooting at the King Soopers supermarket, according to police.
The mass shootings that get widespread attention are the ones in which multiple people are killed, and/or the shooter is a member of one’s preferred outgroup. For every one of those, there are several in which the death toll is mercifully low. They’re the ones that barely make a ripple anymore.
Unlike many of my compatriots, I don’t believe Americans are a uniquely, inherently violent people. (The rise in mass shootings coincided with a dramatic, decades-long decline in violent crime, at least until the nightmare year of 2020.) But Americans are the only ones who have so much heavy weaponry so close at hand.