EDITORIAL — Propaganda campaign?

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Filipinos shunned vaccines made in China not because of any propaganda campaign by the West, but because it was a fact that Beijing would not come clean on the origins of the new virus, and refused to submit its vaccines to assessment by an internationally recognized stringent regulatory authority or SRA.

These details are useful to remember before the facts become muddled enough to fit Beijing’s narrative on COVID, whose origins to this day have yet to be officially established, thanks to Chinese stonewalling. In December 2019, ophthalmologist Li Wenliang posted on social media an alert about a new virus that was sickening and killing people in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei province in central China. Beijing had Li arrested along with seven other COVID whistle-blowers ostensibly for rumor-mongering. In February 2020, Li died of COVID.

Over in Manila, as reports spread about an emerging pandemic, the administration of Rodrigo Duterte refused to impose travel restrictions on visitors from China. The Philippines’ COVID Patients 1 and 2 were a pair of tourists from Wuhan, recorded as early as Jan. 30, 2020. One became the first confirmed COVID death recorded in the Philippines, on Feb. 1, and the first outside China.

Even then, Duterte downplayed the threat, saying the virus would “die a natural death.” When the World Health Organization finally declared the existence of a pandemic, Duterte imposed one of the most stringent lockdowns in the world. At the same time, his administration busied itself with the multibillion-peso sweetheart deal awarded to Pharmally Pharmaceuticals.

Reinforcing reports that the COVID virus sprung from Wuhan, China became the first to produce vaccines. Without SRA approval, however, people outside China preferred to wait for a peer-vetted vaccine. In December 2020, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German firm BioNTech produced such a vaccine for emergency use.

The country would later find out that the Trump administration, working with Philippine diplomats, had pushed for Pfizer to give priority to the Philippines, with 10 million doses of its prized vaccine ready for delivery as early as January 2021. But Teodoro Locsin Jr., at the time the foreign secretary, said “someone dropped the ball” and the Duterte administration held off on signing a confidential disclosure agreement sought by Pfizer.

The suspicion was that the Duterte administration wanted to first unload the China-donated jabs before allowing the entry of the Pfizer shots. No propaganda machine is needed to tell you that those 10 million Pfizer doses could have drastically cut down the death toll in the lethal Alpha COVID wave in the summer of 2021, when vaccination was just starting in the country and hospitals overflowed with patients.