Traditional Chinese medicine is fake : politicised medical commentaries in China in the Covid-19 pandemic

During the unprecedented covid-19 pandemic, investing in medical science to combat the sars-CoV-2 virus has become an administrative priority in almost every national government in the world. Under these circumstances, we have witnessed more and more political interference in the public health sector. High- profile incidents of this kind include Donald Trump’s controversial sup-port for hydroxychloroquine treatment for covid-19 patients, which was heavily criticised by both scientists and the media (bbc, 2020a). In China, where the outbreak started, such political interference is most notably reflected in the Chinese government’s advocacy of traditional Chinese medicine (tcm) treatment for covid-19 patients (The Paper, 2020). This public health policy most recently prompted a wave of public debates on tcm in Chinese society. The influence of the current debate on tcm has gone far beyond the science community, which is evidenced by volumes of related commentaries posted on various social media platforms (Peng & Chen, 2021). The most recent wave of debates on tcm is indeed indicative of how public health- related topics are politicised in Chinese society during the covid-19 pandemic