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Part of the reason why you didn't hear so much about the negative around the Sinovac is because 'misinformation' is smuggling in the conclusion that criticisms / doubts about the sinovac were, well, disinformation.
The Chinese vaccine did not work. Saying that the 'medical consensus seems to be that Sinovac is somewhat effective at preventing bad outcomes from COVID' is more than a reach given that 'bad outcomes from COVID' includes, well, having COVID as a disruptive medical experience. Sinovac failed on the grounds of what it was aimed to be by the Chinese government at the time, marketed as in the donor propaganda that came with the Chinese donations, and what the Chinese government pressed recipient governments to claim after the fact. Sinovac was not provided on the grounds that it would mitigate the worst bad outcomes from COVID- it was marketed as a vaccine to prevent COVID, on the basis of Chinese generosity and accomplishment.
There's reasons that the Sinovac vaccines largely faded from PRC media publicity campaigns in the international relations spectrum.
Is there evidence as to the extent to which it didn't work at preventing severe outcomes as opposed to infection?
Last I heard (pre-Omicron) it was somewhat worse (but not useless) compared to mRNA vaxxes on infection/transmission -- maybe competitive with the adenovirus ones? But now that it's pivoted to "we never said the RNA vaccines prevented infection sweaty -- we were always just trying to STOP PEOPLE FROM DYING" I'm not sure I trust the bare assertion that the Chinese vaccine was particularly more useless than the Western ones.
AFAIK it did provoke some amount of antibody production -- which is the only mechanism I can imagine by which Pfizer etc. were "working"?
This seems particularly uncharitable. There was a decent amount of evidence that the vaccines suppressed spread of the original COVID variants, and became less effective as the virus mutated away from the vaccine strain. I'm unsure whether the updated vaccines can again suppress spread.
I could as well write a post about people saying 'we never ACTUALLY meant the vaccines would make you sterile dumbass' or 'we didn't mean you would LITERALLY drop dead from the mRNA vaccines causing blood clots' or a litany of other claims that are clearly absurd given the billions of doses given.
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It's probably true that Sinovac didn't work. It's probably also true that the DoD neither knew that nor cared when they did this campaign, though.
I'd gamble that the government probably did know at some point, but the campaign allegedly started in mid-2020, so it's very likely to be true that they didn't know for sure (or had at best a low confidence level) that Sinovac would turn out to be kinda lack-luster at that point in time, though probably still better than no vaccine I think was at least conceptually clear, if not very strongly.
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