Day: July 15, 2021

Advertisement Chinese media outlet Caixin is reporting that China plans to use an mRNA vaccine, jointly developed by China’s Fosun Pharma and German company BioNTech, as a booster shot for those who have been fully vaccinated using Chinese vaccines. “Chinese authorities plan to use the vaccine, which goes by the brand name Comirnaty, as a booster shot for people who have received inactivated-virus vaccines, people close to regulators told Caixin,” according to the report. The vaccines produced by Chinese companies – including China’s two leading COVID-19 vaccine producers, Sinopharm and…

Advertisement The head of the World Health Organization acknowledged it was premature to rule out a potential link between the COVID-19 pandemic and a laboratory leak, and he said Thursday he is asking China to be more transparent as scientists search for the origins of the coronavirus. In a rare departure from his usual deference to powerful member countries, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said getting access to raw data had been a challenge for the international team that traveled to China earlier this year to investigate the source of…

Jul 15th 2021 TO FREE-THINKING users of WeChat, a social-media platform, it was a depressingly familiar event. Late on July 6th, those who tried to browse accounts run by LGBT societies at several universities in China were greeted with messages saying the forums, which had been used to publicise events such as webinars and film nights, had been closed for violating unspecified rules. The accounts had probably offended the government, which has little regard for the rights of sexual minorities and even less for freedom of speech. Listen to this…

Jul 15th 2021 BEIJING AND SHANGHAI THE BEIJING International Book Fair, which takes place in August, gives the better-known view of China’s publishing industry: state-controlled and gargantuan. The organiser, China Publishing Group, owns 40 of the 580 government-run firms that dominate the country’s $15bn book-publishing market—second in size only to America’s. But another book jamboree, held one month earlier in the capital, shows a less familiar aspect. The abC Art Book Fair, which this year ran for three days from July 9th, is all that the other is not: independent,…