Online nationalists break with China on embracing Pfizer’s Covid drug

Some went as far as accusing a Communist Party Princeling of being in the pocket of the American company.

China’s online nationalists, who used to the biggest proponents of the country’s anti-Covid measures, are now spreading misinformation about Paxlovid, a Covid drug developed by Pfizer, which China in the past few weeks has been distributing to local hospitals as waves of infections are surging.

They question the efficacy of the drug, which has been proved by numerous tests and studies, and accuse high profile Chinese experts with medical background who recommended Paxlovid of being bribed by Pfizer. 

Casting doubt on Pfizer and its Covid medicine isn’t new on China’s internet, although for over two years it was China’s state media that was spearheading the smear campaign. At the time, China was trying to promote its own model of fighting the pandemic while criticizing the rest of the world by, for example, discrediting Western vaccines such as the one made by Pfizer.

But China’s sudden abandonment of zero-Covid early last month has left many confused, including China’s internet censors, who are no longer certain what kind of speech to censor and what not to without new government-approved narratives and clear censoring orders, according to Eric Liu, a former Weibo censor who now works at China Digital Times.

Meanwhile, nationalist influencers are sticking with old official Covid propaganda, which is more likely to protect them from censorship and is guaranteed to draw traffic online.

“They are treating this as business,” Liu told me when I talked with him for a VOA Mandarin story. 

So far, the misinformation campaign against Paxlovid has been given a free pass from censors and authorities. But the campaign doesn’t seem to reflect where China stands on the issue. Other than deploying Paxlovid across the country, China is also reportedly looking to work with Pfizer to produce a generic version of the drug for potential mass production and distribution inside the country as Paxlovid is quite costly and in short supply.

Paxlovid was first approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions in December 2021. Multiple studies show that the prescription drug is highly effective at reducing risks of hospitalization and death for both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.

China first approved the use of Paxlovid in February 2022. In August, Zhejiang Huahai Pharmaceutical signed a deal with Pfizer to locally produce the drug for China’s domestic distribution. 

Since China dropped zero-Covid, infections have swept the country, causing a high demand of Paxlovid. Although the medicine is available in community hospitals in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, getting access to it has been hard for most people. Online scalpers are charging over ten times the normal price. Elites are sending each other Paxlovid as gifts.

The popularity of the drug has not sat well with online nationalists, who used to spread misinformation about Pfizer alongside state media.

To cast doubt on it, some asked why Paxlovid, as allegedly effective as it is, wasn’t able to save the one million Americans who died with Covid. 

However, Paxlovid wasn’t used to treat patients until after December 2021. The total US Covid death number of 2022 was about 280 thousand.

Last week, rumors were spreading online that a Pfizer executive in Shanghai died of Covid. Later, rumors were refuted as the person who died worked for a different company and had nothing to do with Pfizer. Nonetheless, some nationalist influencers took advantage of the misinformation and asked how can Pfizer's medicine be trusted when one of its own executives was killed by the virus.

Online nationalists also waged a smear campaign against high profile public figures who recommended Paxlovid and defended Pfizer. 

One of the victims was Tao Siliang (陶斯亮). Tao is the chairwoman of China Medicine Science Foundation, a philanthropic organization managed by the National Health Commission. Tao was the daughter of China’s former vice premier Tao Zhu. Her mother Zeng Zhi was a top leader at the Communist Party’s organization department. 

Tao was accused of being paid to promote Paxlovid last week after she had published an article on WeChat defending the efficacy of the drug. The accusation was based on the fact that Tao’s organization received donations from Pfizer for years.

In a statement published by Wang Xiaodong, who is widely regarded as the father of modern Chinese nationalism, Tao said that she left the organization long before Pfizer started making donations and that the chairwoman title was only honorary.

A supporter of Tao, through whose WeChat account Tao regularly publishes her articles, including the one defending Paxlovid, chastised Tao’s accusers for baselessly attacking Tao in the name of patriotism.

The current information war on Paxlovid has its roots in China’s past state media misinformation campaign against Pfizer’s Covid vaccine.

In January 2021, a Global Times opinion piece tried to call into question the safety of the Pfizer vaccine. It claimed that American media went silent on an incident in Norway where 23 elderly people died after inoculation. The article also claimed that investigators believed that 13 of them were killed by the vaccine’s side effects .

挪威23名老人在注射辉瑞疫苗后死亡，其中13人的死亡原因已有官方评估，被认为是注射疫苗的副作用所致。

But it can’t be further from the truth. The Norwegian Institute of Public Health at the time did not come to the conclusion that they died because of the vaccine.

For over two years, top propaganda outlets such as People’s Daily, Xinhua and CCTV never stopped highlighting negative stories about Pfizer and other Western vaccines. 

Now that China has dropped old narratives and embraced Paxlovid, state media hasn’t yet produced another attack piece on Pfizer. But the job is now carried on by nationalist influencers.

In the past, China was quick to crack down on those questioning its Covid control measures by censoring posts and detaining those who posted them. But so far, online nationalists who spread misinformation have not been penalized.

China Digital Time’s Liu told me that part of the reason is that censors don’t know what to do with these posts. The other part is that nationalist influencers draw so much traffic to platforms like Weibo that they enjoy a lot more freedom of speech than others.