China, Arrogance and COVID (UPDATED)

Based on a Reuters’ deep dive into the PRC’s National Health Bureau reports, as of Thanksgiving, China faced a huge new outbreak of the coronavirus: 31,454, out of which 27,517 are asymptomatic. China’s response to a single case of COVID is to lockdown anything that touched that victim… which has resulted in entire factories and apartment buildings going on lockdown, shops and restaurants closing, which many believe has added a continuing 20%+ crush on China’s economy. These are the highest daily figures since the virus began in Wuhan back in 2019, according to the Associated Press. Today, larger cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing, have tightened COVID-19 restrictions to control transmission. As of November 21st, CNBC reported that 412 million PRC residents were directly affected.

It was obviously galling for folks in China watching their national soccer team compete in Qatar, where massive crowds populate the stadia and surrounding areas. Chinese residents were even admonished not to gather in groups to watch their own TVs. You have to ask, if China is so set on its Zero-COVID policy, rife with severe restrictions and lockdowns, why is this happening? Simply put, COVID containment requires a balancing act, a combination of reasonable controls over human contact as well as pervasive inoculation with an effective vaccine. China’s seeming official arrogance, an unwillingness to admit that their vaccine is not up to the task, has forced them to rely on lockdowns and strict interpersonal rules instead. Adding that zero-COVID policy only made a bad situation that much worse.

We’ve known for a while that China’s single-dose vaccines, made by companies like Sinopharm and Sinovac, are vastly less effective than the two-shot mRNA products from Moderna and BioNTech-Pfizer, enhanced with reengineered boosters. In 2020, China began a campaign of contributing its vaccine to nations in desperate need of inoculations; an estimated 90 countries received some or all their vaccine needs from the PRC. Not only are new purportedly variant resistant upgrades of China’s vaccines way too slow to develop than mRNA-driven injections, their overall effectiveness remains simply below expectations… and falling as variants appear.

Even back on June 22, 2021, the New York Times looked at the challenging numbers from countries relying on the Chinese-made vaccine: “Now, examples from several countries suggest that the Chinese vaccines may not be very effective at preventing the spread of the virus, particularly the new variants. The experiences of those countries lay bare a harsh reality facing a postpandemic world: The degree of recovery may depend on which vaccines governments give to their people.

“In the Seychelles, Chile, Bahrain and Mongolia, 50 to 68 percent of the populations have been fully inoculated, outpacing the United States, according to Our World in Data, a data tracking project. All four ranked among the top 10 countries with the worst Covid outbreaks as recently as last week, according to data from The New York Times. And all four are mostly using shots made by two Chinese vaccine makers, Sinopharm and Sinovac Biotech… ‘If the vaccines are sufficiently good, we should not see this pattern,’ said Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong. ‘The Chinese have a responsibility to remedy this.’” Well, they really didn’t (couldn’t), and the results, particularly in overcrowded China, have been disastrous.

Internally, Chinese residents are beginning to look at this bifurcated reality: China vs the rest of the world: “An open letter questioning the country's continued zero-Covid policies and asking if China was ‘on the same planet’ as Qatar quickly spread on mobile messenger WeChat on Tuesday [11/22], before being censored… Comments on the Twitter-like Weibo social network are rife from viewers who speak about how watching this year's matches is making them feel divided from the rest of the world.

“Some speak of their perception that it is ‘weird’ to see hundreds of thousands of people gathering, without wearing masks or needing to show evidence of a recent Covid-19 test. ‘There are no separate seats so people can maintain social distance, and there is nobody dressed in white and blue [medical] garb on the sidelines. This planet has become really divided… On one side of the world, there is the carnival that is the World Cup, on the other are rules not to visit public places for five days,’ one says… Some say they have had difficulty explaining to their children why the scenes from the World Cup are so different to those people face at home.

“There are many in China, though, who have been critical of countries overseas opening up while the World Health Organization still calls the Covid-19 virus an ‘acute global emergency.’… However, there is no end in sight to China's existing measures. This week, the National Health Commission spokesman ‘warned against any slacking in epidemic prevention and control’ and urged ‘more resolute and decisive measures’ to bring cases under control.

“Local governments in major cities have reintroduced mass testing and travel restrictions and ultimately delivered a message that people should try to stay at home… But after three years of such measures, people are frustrated, resulting in protests in the last month in both the cities of Guangzhou and Zhengzhou.” BBC.com, November 24th. In late November, the entire country erupted in massive protests (above) against COVID restrictions. Still China is becoming a veritable Petrie dish, a breeding ground for new variants that could easily spread to the rest of the world.

With an uncaring autocrat exercising total control, equally unwilling to admit that his nation’s medical scientists continue to be unable to create and distribute an effective vaccine, China’s COVID woes are far from over. Xi’s stubbornness, his arrogance, have not served his people well. But neither Xi nor his failing policies are likely to change anytime soon.

But before we cast aspersions on Beijing, stubbornness and denial have not served this country particularly well either. In a Yale University study of COVID patterns in Ohio and Florida, reported in the November 15th Yale Insights, infections among those most likely to oppose COVID controls and vaccination requirements are significantly higher than those willing to accept medical reality: “New research from Yale SOM [School of Management] points to another factor that puts people at greater risk of dying from COVID-19: party affiliation. The study finds that excess deaths during the pandemic were 76% higher among Republicans than Democrats in two states, Ohio and Florida. What’s more, the partisan gap in death rates increased significantly after vaccines were introduced.”

When autocrats rule or political parties define medical reality in distorted partisan terms, their followers invariably suffer… while often continuing to adhere to those distortions. This only accelerates the growth of new variants by providing a fresh and significant base in which to incubate and then spread vaccine resistant viral strains.

I’m Peter Dekom, and there are no “alternative facts,” only facts, and nature truly does not respond to political pressure, distorted partisan “science” or voter preferences.