More than half of all Chinese do not plan to be vaccinated against swine flu because they are unsure about the safety of the shot, a survey by state media said yesterday.
The poll by the China Daily and popular Web portal sohu.com said more than 54 percent of the 2,000 respondents said they did not want the A(H1N1) vaccine — a huge turnaround from two months ago, when 76 percent said they did.
“The vaccine has been developed and administered so quickly that I couldn’t help questioning its quality and reliability,” the paper quoted 36-year-old Zhang Lin, who refused the shot for her eight-year-old son, as saying.
China, which has the world’s largest population at 1.3 billion people, has launched a mass swine flu vaccination campaign in a bid to stave off large outbreaks, especially as winter — and the regular flu season — sets in here.
But only 30 percent of those polled by the China Daily said they definitely would like to receive the shot. About 15 percent said they would make a decision based on what other people did.
The government has said it plans to inoculate five percent of the population, or 65 million people, against swine flu by year’s end. So far, 300,000 people have received the vaccination.
More than 33,000 cases of A(H1N1) influenza had been reported as of Friday, health ministry figures showed, with the number of infections accelerating in recent weeks. Two deaths have so far been confirmed.
Health authorities have repeatedly warned they are facing a “grim” task of preventing outbreaks and keeping the death toll at a minimum.
“Tens of millions could be infected,” the China Daily quoted Zeng Guang (曾光), chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as saying.
The WHO said nearly 5,000 swine flu deaths had been recorded as of Oct. 18.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema