How a fake network pushes pro-China propaganda

> This comment was based not on imagination but an article on BBC

Assuming that a BBC article is describing HN is already imagination. If you think it applies to HN, I want to see specific links. Tip: look at the account histories first. Mostly it takes just a few seconds to see that $suspected-spy has been posting to HN for years about everything from Hyperloop to Rust to PyPy. I think the odds that such a user was planted as a Chinese agent in 2015 or whatever are similar to Russell's teacup orbiting the moon.

> It couldn't happen here, I hear you say

No, I'm saying that when commenters have posted such insinuations here, close study of the data has consistently shown them to be nothing more than cheap internet pontification, a.k.a. bullshit. The more flamboyant and grandiose the claims, the more fantasy-driven they prove to be. People come up with this stuff purely because they want to believe it, and will literally read anything into anything.

The problem is that such insinuations are not cost-free. They add noise, poison community, and in several cases have turned into mobs that have hounded people off HN. Hence the rule that you can't do it unless you have actual evidence. If anyone comes up with actual evidence—literally any whatsoever—we'll take it seriously and look closely into it. But someone else having an opposing view on $hot-topic doesn't count as evidence.

I know I'm sounding "flamboyant and grandiose" myself, which is not optimal, but it would take a robot not to lose patience after looking at as much of this data that I have. The truth, as far as I've been able to determine it after tons of effort, is that you guys really don't know what you're talking about. Sorry for being blunt. Here's a longer explanation from when I was in a better mood: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725.

This is a topic for a completely different discussion. In short, 9/11 happened much earlier than 9/11, in the sense that there were decades of anger and resentment on the part of - generally speaking - Middle-East Muslim community at the actions of Israel and the USA. When 9/11 happened some people were actually happy. I know this because I spoke to them personally. It's hard do believe but it shows how large the divide had become: you needed this kind of horror to make it a mainstream topic.

So what the American president is doing? Instead of finally starting to work hard on American-ME relations, he decided to invade another country. A country that had been unsuccessfully invaded in the past and has the worst natural conditions for invasion, with Taliban with bazookas hiding in caves and ordinary people living in villages, and the two freely mixing. What could possibly go wrong?

I'm not saying that peace in the ME is easy, it even became a kind of meme that it's impossible, but there is no hope if Israel doesn't consider some concessions. And year after year, decade after decade it becomes worse. Any American interventions, any casualty makes it much worse. But it seems we're to stupid to work on the causes and can only deal with the results. It just makes me sad as ordinary people can't do anything about it.

> I wasn't making a direct comparison

You were quite obviously comparing Xinjiang to the Holocaust. If you're backing off from that offensive comment, then that's good, but you did indeed draw the connection.

> You claim Vaccine disinfo by the NYTs. You point out that actually, Chinese vaccines are as good if not better than the other, worst performing vaccines (Russian, etc.).

The Russian Sputnik-V vaccine is actually one of the most effective vaccines. Based on phase-III trial data, it's similar to Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer. The Mongolian Health Ministry found not only that Sinopharm performed better than the Russian vaccine, but that it also performed better than the British AstraZeneca vaccine, which is one of the most widely used vaccines in the West.

> Chinese vaccine makers specifically refuse to release their user data proving efficacy (unlike western vaccines that continually do so) so we are left to guess how effective they are.

This is simply not true. There are multiple peer-reviewed papers reporting on the results of phase-III trials of the Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines (e.g., [1,2]). This is in addition to several reports by national health agencies from across the world about the efficacy of these vaccines (e.g., [3]). There is a lot of data in the public domain, and the efficacy of these vaccines is well understood.

> But the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Gao Fu, said at a conference Saturday their efficacy rates needed improving.

Gao Fu was widely misquoted in the Western press. He made some general comments about how to improve efficacy of vaccines, and proposed very similar ideas as are being considered in the West with AstraZeneca and J&J. That was then spun as an "admission" that Chinese vaccines don't work. Gao Fu even publicly complained about how his words were being misrepresented, but that didn't stop various irresponsible newspapers from continuing to misrepresent his statements.

> China has all but shut down their country because they have no confidence their vaccines work against Delta.

China is reacting strongly to the latest outbreak because China has a zero-tolerance strategy. Even if they were using the Moderna or BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, they would follow the exact same policy. After all, SARS-CoV-2 still continues to spread in countries that have more than 50% vaccination rates with mRNA vaccines, and that's completely unacceptable to Chinese society. They are set of getting back to zero incidence.

> I'm thoroughly unimpressed by your only example of this claimed bias

I raised one example, just to illustrate the problem. The example I raised was one of the most respected newspapers in the US promoting unscientific anti-vax narratives. That's pretty bad. In your response, you delivered a second example of bad reporting on China: Gao Fu's misconstrued comments.

I don't mean to be impolite, but in your comments here, you've very confidently repeated a number of false claims about Chinese vaccines that are very widely believed in the West, largely because of the low quality and nationalistic bent of reporting on China.

> But it's clear you have made up your mind which "side" you are on in all this.

I'm on the "side" that says we should have an accurate picture of China. I don't want a glowing picture of the country. I just object to the extremely distorted, narrow image that's become widespread in the US and Europe over the last few years. As I said at the outset, for people who are at all familiar with China, the "China" that you read about in the news is totally unrecognizable. I don't think demonizing a major country that most people know next to nothing about is a good idea.

> Does your livelihood depend on them in any way?

Please read HN's rules about these sorts of accusations.

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34037666/

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34246358/

3. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2107715

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I'll leave the issue of the comparisons you're drawing, though I'll note that you've drawn them yet again.

> I'm sorry is that your opinion?

It's the result of a peer-reviewed study conducted by the Gamelaya Institute and published in the prestigious journal The Lancet.[1]

> And Russia, like China, have done all they can to obscure standardized third-party testing of their vaccines (because they are worried that less efficacy is a political loss). They limit the data, then turn on their propaganda machines to try and convince people they are the best. Apparently, it works.

> ...

> Results of data handed to them as a honeypot. The first rule of data analysis is you collect your own data, otherwise you could be setup. And China specifically forbid the release of the raw patient data, as I already mentioned.

The phase-III trials weren't even conducted in China. They were conducted by institutes that have nothing to do with the Chinese government in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Turkey, Brazil and other countries. The data is all public and published in reputable, peer-reviewed journals. The WHO and various national drug regulators around the world have evaluated the data and approved the vaccines. The vaccines' real-world effectiveness has since been evaluated by various national health agencies, and the Chilean Health Ministry has published a detailed analysis in a peer-reviewed journal.

I linked to some of these papers in my previous comment, so I don't know where you're getting the idea that the data is secret, or that it hasn't been evaluated by independent third parties. What you're saying here is just factually wrong.

> Gao Fu said what he said, it was translated directly

Again, this is not the case. Gao Fu's statements were not published, even in Chinese. One of the slides from his talk was photographed and posted online. It speaks very generally about vaccines (not even Chinese vaccines in particular), and discusses ways to improve their efficacy. The suggestions are identical to suggestions being made at the time for improving the efficacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Someone from a US think tank then claimed that Gao Fu was saying Chinese vaccines were substandard, and that spread in the press. Gao Fu then gave an interview in which he said that he was being misrepresented, but that was just written off by Western news media.

> He walked it back (of course) because his political masters saw it as embarrassing.

Or because his statements were actually misrepresented. If you look at the slide that this is all based on, it doesn't even mention Chinese vaccines. It's very general/vague.

But there's actually hard data on the efficacy of the Chinese vaccines, collected outside of China and published in solid journals outside China, so we don't have to parse the words of a Chinese health official.

> Chinese officials TO THIS DAY publicly claim they need to make their vaccines more efficient.

You linked to a statement by the Chinese Ambassador to the US, who says that in light of the surge in cases in the United States and the outbreak in China, both countries should work together to improve vaccines. It looks to me like a jab at the US for not having the virus under control, concealed behind a supposedly friendly message. As I said before, there's hard data on the efficacy of Chinese vaccines, so we don't have to go parsing Tweets by Chinese diplomats.

To me, the vaccine issue is a pretty good illustration of the problems with reporting on China. A lot of people have the same general sense that you've expressed that there's no data Chinese vaccines, or that the data's being concealed, despite the fact that this is quite provably not the case. This impression is widespread because of really terrible reporting like the NY Times article I linked earlier. If the NY Times were to sow FUD about the Moderna vaccine in the same way, there would be an uproar, and rightly so.

1. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...