Rattled by New Delhi’s ‘Vaccine Maitri’ initiative, the Chinese government’s mouthpiece, the Global Times, has started a smear campaign against India in a big way.
In a series of articles and opinion pieces, the newspaper has not just questioned India’s capacity to produce enough number of vaccine doses, citing the fire at the Serum Institute of India’s campus in Pune last week, but also the “efficacy of India’s locally-developed vaccines”, taking a potshot at Covaxin, India’s indigenous preventive against Covid-19, developed by Bharat Biotech in collaboration with Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and National Institute of Virology (NIV).
Beijing’s anxiety stems from the fact that it is seen globally as the country where the SARS-CoV-2 originated, which has resulted in over two million deaths and around 10 million infections globally till date. The pandemic brought the world economy to a grinding halt. India, on the other hand, is being seen as a benevolent…