The New York Times on Friday published an opinion piece titled "It's Time to Trust China's and Russia's Vaccines," saying the two countries' vaccines can be a solution to the shortages of vaccines, which are the hope for the world to win the battle against the coronavirus.
The piece caused quite a stir on the Twittersphere because it is rare for The New York Times to publish stories or opinion pieces to call out bias against China or Russia. Last year, the newspaper labeled China's lockdown measures as "draconian."
The article, by Indian public health activist Achal Prabhala and Malaysian public interest lawyer Chee Yoke Ling, was based on solid evidence and sound reasoning. The article noted that interim results from late-stage trials show Sputnik V, the Russian vaccine, has an efficacy rate of 91.6 percent, according to a peer-reviewed report by the leading medical journal The Lancet.
As for China-made vaccines, many countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Serbia, Morocco, Hungary and Pakistan, have approved China's Sinopharm vaccine, the article said. And 1.8 million people in the UAE had received it as of mid-January. Bolivia, Indonesia, Turkey, Brazil and Chile have approved and begun to roll out another Chinese vaccine, from Sinovac.
The article also pointed out the fact that China and Russia started inoculating some of their citizens last year. The author also backed their points of view with the fact that now there is significant reliability data for the Chinese and Russian vaccines: Trial results in the UAE in early December placed the efficacy of the Sinopharm vaccine at 86 percent; while Sinovac's vaccine reported 91 percent efficacy in trials in Turkey, and 65 percent in trials in Indonesia.
Western news outlets have published stories questioning the transparency and accuracy of the data of trials of Chinese vaccines. Some falsely accused China of starting mass inoculations among the country's high-risk groups last year in mass, uncontrolled experiments. Such inoculations in China were criticized as reckless experiments, but were labeled "emergency use" when done in the West.
Some expressed doubt about China's data on the grounds that the trials in different countries reported different rates of efficacy. In fact, the protocols for trials in different places vary even for the same vaccine, leading to different data.
Western news outlets have spent months bashing Russia's Sputnik V vaccine, but their Moscow correspondents were seen lining up for the jabs last month. When Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the registration of Sputnik V as the world's first vaccine against COVID-19 last year, many Western media reports dubbed the registration a dangerous rush.
Such prejudices will hinder efforts to distribute the vaccines among countries equitably. Although effective vaccines have been rolled out far sooner than experts had expected, the world faces a crunch of vaccine supply in general and uneven distribution of supplies among rich and poor countries.
Inoculation with COVID-19 vaccines is now under way in more than 50 countries, yet all but two of them are high- or upper-middle income countries, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last month. Only 25 doses have been administered in one lowest-income country, he said, compared with more than 39 million doses in at least 49 higher-income countries.
China's COVID-19 vaccines may play an important role in the global fight against the pandemic, given its affordability and low storage requirement – they can be stored in a standard refrigerator at 2-8 degrees Celsius while the U.S. company Moderna's vaccine needs to be stored at minus 20 degrees Celsius and the vaccine jointly developed by U.S. firm Pfizer and German company BioNTech requires storage at minus 70. This means China's vaccines are a lot more useful for developing countries that cannot afford large numbers of freezers.
Bias against China has already contributed to the botched response to the pandemic in some Western countries, especially the United States. The Trump administration failed to take cues from China's coronavirus response and even regarded China's tough measures in fighting the virus as unnecessary and even violations of human rights. So far, the coronavirus has killed nearly half a million Americans. Bigotry and bias can cost lives!
The prejudices against Chinese and Russian vaccines may have dented the confidence in these vaccines in some countries, although over 40 countries have asked to import Chinese vaccines. It is time for major media outlets around the world to bury bias and contribute to a more efficient and equitable distribution of vaccines around the world.
(The author is a deputy editor-in-chief of Shenzhen Daily.)