China censors social media posts about vaccine scandal, monitor says, as tabloid suggests issue has been overblown

President Xi Jinping might have described China’s latest vaccine scandal as “appalling”, but censors are still keeping a close eye on social media users who vent their spleens on the subject, while state media has accused some groups of overblowing the issue and the government has reportedly banned coverage of the vaccines from Tuesday onwards.

According to a project run by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong, which monitors censorship on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like service, the Chinese word for “vaccine” was one of the most restricted on Sunday and Monday.

Fu King-wa, an assistant professor who heads the project, known as Weiboscope, said also that the rate at which posts related to the scandal were being screened peaked on Sunday. For every 10,000 posts made across the 120,000 accounts monitored, an average of 63 were blocked, he said.

One post that was removed by the censors said: “People from the drug and vaccine regulator should resign immediately, this is shameful!”

Another that disappeared said: “When everyone in the country is rushing to get milk powder and vaccines elsewhere … more people will understand why Hong Kong and Macau are rejecting the [mainland] system.”

Despite the deletions, Fu said the government had not completely blocked discussion of the scandal, which concerns the production of substandard DPT (diphtheria, pertussis – also known as whooping cough – and tetanus) vaccines by Chinese company Changsheng Bio-technology.

Because there was such a huge number of posts on the subject, the government “basically allows people to mention the incident or circulate information about it, including references to official media posts”, he said.