I can’t understand it. Look at what Covid is doing right now. It’s fucking awful. Why couldn’t they just stay with Zero-COVID till everyone got vaccinated? Why haven’t they vaccinated everyone by now? It’s so frustrating. Who the fuck cares if someone assholes protested with blank paper? Just…why?
Unfortunately despite all of the Chinese leaderships efforts, there’s a number of problems they have to contend with.
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Many elderly Chinese hate modern medicine, they’re anti vaccines but in a different way than anti vaxxers in the west are, more focused on traditional Chinese medicine even the stuff that gets disproven. That being said China’s actual vaccination rate is really really good compared to many other countries. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations the main problem is that the elderly won’t get vaccinated and people are refusing second / third shots.
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Unfortunately just like every other country, the Chinese people are not immune to brainworms. The lockdowns are stressful and they just want to be done with it, people’s lives be damned. The CPC is not dictatorial, they do respond to the people’s wants.
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Covid just isn’t going anywhere. Other nations have repeatedly shown that they have no desire to ever prevent spread and the increased transmission of newer variants means the lockdowns that are already growing unpopular needs to be even more intense to actually function.
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It’s strangling the economy. Doing it for a few years with the lighter lockdowns was feasible but like point 3, it’s never ending. China can’t handle it on their own and the stricter lockdowns need to be the greater the impact on the nation. Xi and the CPC are popular because their policies brought huge wealth increases into China improving the QOL for millions and millions of people and that’s stagnating.
China showed over and over that getting rid of Covid could have been done, and the world just didn’t give a fuck. And unfortunately, the window has long since passed, they just can’t do it on their own.
Powdered endangered species, the ones you always hear about. Those must be effective, otherwise the government wouldn’t be trying to stop them.
To add to this, using that website’s data you can see a point worth noting. Roughly 10-15 percent of their people are more vaccinated (relative to population) than the US and have been for a lot longer. They’ve vaccinated earlier and perhaps better than almost any country with a much much much higher total amount of people to take to do so. They’ve maintained the attempt to defeat covid entirely for a lot longer with a lot less help than most other countries as well.
Whatever the rest of the equation is, it is incredibly hard for anyone in good faith to fault their efforts or results so far. Here’s hoping they’re able to use a lot of the systems and structures they put in place to deal with the spread and vaccination much better than any of us did to also deal with the outbreaks and illness once they open up and it becomes normalized, much like we completely fucked the ball (I think that’s the phrase) on and unfortunately normalized for the world.
Here’s hoping they keep those systems and structures in place in case this incredibly shitty gamble of it “becoming like the flu” continues to not pan out so hot and we start listening to actual scientists, instead of talking heads, again.
Vaccine hesitancy is somewhat high from what I understand, talking to colleagues and relatives in mainland China, and colleagues in the US with family in China.
I’m sure they’ll make a better effort at contact-tracing and reduction of risk through less restrictive measures than most countries. In general Zero COVID is not sustainable, it could be if everyone were on the same page but the entirety of the rest of the world has more or less given up. At the end of the day it is a market economy, just with slightly different features than most market economies.
Vaccines are pretty good at reducing severe symptoms, but they’re not great for long term immunity and counterproductive in the long term - unless they invest heavily in booster shots, but the population is already skeptical of the existing series…
We already basically know that immune imprinting risks apply to SARS-COV-2 infections (expected, it’s a coronavirus) thanks to a well done Italian study where subjects with memory B cells for a couple of endemic seasonal alphacoronaviruses (NL63 and 229E) had worse COVID-19 outcomes controlling for other factors - so it’s reasonably likely that a vaccine series which creates spike protein subunit antibodies for previous versions of SARS-COV-2 will probably hamper immune responses to future mutated versions.
Where does the hesitancy come from there? Is it still reactionary conspiracy theories or is there a different narrative?
It’s mostly elderly who lived through the cultural revolution. They had their lives messed with for what appears to be, in their minds, no reason so they still doubt the government. These people are also not health literate and alternative medicine is still popular. There’s also a long history of faulty products and lack of oversight when it comes to medicine in China. The quality of medicine in China has improved over the last 20 years, but if you’re 70 it might not be enough to overcome any skepticism
It’s disgusting that all the reporting in the West is downright gleeful at the deaths of Chinese people and levying accusations it has no actual evidence of but I think there’s a few things to consider here:
First the task of vaccinating everyone in China would be an absurd feat. Even just producing 1.4 billion vaccines in the necessary time frame for them all to be effective would be impressive. It would be a massive logistical feat to do this.
Second, China can’t/won’t stay closed forever. The Chinese bourgeoisie certainly wouldn’t want it to and there is a question of the masses. It comes down to the fact that the rest of the world has decided to open up now and China is too integrated into the global economy to not follow suit. They aren’t willing to endure what autarky would cause.
Finally I think a lot of people in spaces like this overlook the CPC’s revisionism. Whether this is because of a serious commitment to Denigism and Xi thought - or an overcorrection in an effort to combat Western imperialism and misinformation varies, but the party is fundamentally a collaborationist party. They are not acting solely in the interest of the workers. Instead they are attempting to balance the interest of the Chinese masses, the Chinese bourgeoisie, and international finance capital to increase the productive forces of the country. Mao’s China had massive vaccination campaigns in a more rural, less educated, and more superstitious China than today’s and they were very effective, but the party has sacrificed the kind of community and radical patriotism that produced that in favor of the development of productive forces and all of the alienation that brings. They are maybe more of a functional state than anything in the West, but they do not have the ability to fully mobilize the masses in the way that was necessary to defeat this disease. I think the question of whether any lone communist party in any given country could have done it is legitimate, but the CPC is not even that.
Mao’s China had massive vaccination campaigns in a more rural, less educated, and more superstitious China than today’s and they were very effective, but the party has sacrificed the kind of community and radical patriotism that produced that in favor of the development of productive forces and all of the alienation that brings.
I think you’re kidding yourself if you believe 1970s era China would have done better than modern China. Barefoot doctors aren’t enough to stop Covid from spreading.
I’m not sure how Mao’s China would have done against this particular disease, but it should be obvious that the technical skill or equipment of medical providers had very little to do with how dangerous this disease has been. Countries with very good doctors and hospitals like the US and the UK were ravaged by it not because of their doctors, but because the masses could not be mobilized (or demobilized in a sense) to prevent the spread of disease and were in fact very easily compelled to fall in line with the bourgeoisie who did not care about the disease either through stupidity and misinformation or selfishness and greed. China in the 60s would have undoubtedly struggled to produce vaccines, masks, and to treat the worst cases, but reaching the masses and leading them in correct action in regards to other diseases is exactly what they did and there’s little reason to suspect they couldn’t have done it for this one either.
Countries with very good doctors and hospitals like the US and the UK were ravaged by it not because of their doctors, but because the masses could not be mobilized (or demobilized in a sense) to prevent the spread of disease and were in fact very easily compelled to fall in line with the bourgeoisie who did not care about the disease either through stupidity and misinformation or selfishness and greed.
You’re confusing necessary conditions with sufficient conditions. It’s necessary to have healthcare facilities on par with your standard Western countries in order to effectively combat Covid, but as we can clearly see, it’s obviously not a sufficient one.
but reaching the masses and leading them in correct action in regards to other diseases is exactly what they did and there’s little reason to suspect they couldn’t have done it for this one either.
We’re talking about a time period where the average person didn’t even have a b/w TV. How would “reaching the masses” even look like besides people reading about it in a newspaper? Communist cadre aren’t a hivemind that instantaneously pick up whatever command Mao had in Beijing. The main difference between Covid and smallpox or TB is that Covid is an active infectious disease, so the time lag is actually critical. Compare that to today with contact tracing and being able to quickly propagate news. I think you vastly underestimate how behind Mao’s China was techwise and why Deng had to do what he did.
Before: what’s wrong with China where they’re sticking with zero covid while the rest of the world moved on a year ago?
Now: why did China end zero covid? It’s going to kill millions of unvaccinated people!
Can’t win.
US 7-day average infections: ~68,000
China 7-day average infections: ~7,000
Taking population differences into consideration, the USA is doing about 30x worse than China right now just based on infections. China’s line is also currently going down while the USA’s is going up. What am I missing? Like, yes, they might be chilling out a little regarding zero covid but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to raw-dog it like the USA.
I need to see some sources that are not just some dude from the CIA pulling numbers out of his ass.
