Here's a cynical view: What if the CCP (Xi) gave the directive to increase hospital admissions and decrease staffing in key areas (crematoriums, clinics, etc) as a psyop to convince Western elites that dropping Zero Covid policy was a mistake, and therefore, bait them into panicking all over again, to which they then respond by reintroducing self-destructive measures?
Two problems with that hypothesis, both of them lethal:
1) Most of the western healthcare "elites" already are convinced that some form of Zero COVID is the way to go. The lockdowns have eased in the west because of political and economic pressures, not because the elites had a sudden spasm of libertarianism.
2) The blank paper protests in China were real. The video footage confirms this. The abrupt and haphazard ending of Zero COVID is more consistent with Xi and the CCP surrendering to virus and to political pressures regarding Zero COVID. If any group were to be targeted by a "psyop", it would be the Chinese people themselves--and what filters through on social media suggests that even the Chinese people aren't buying into that.
Always remember that the image of the CCP as this paragon of long term planning is a complete and utter fiction which has NEVER been supported by the facts on the ground. Lack of planning is how they got the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Lack of planning and lack of demographic mathematics is how they got the suicidal One Child Policy. Lack of planning is how they got locked into the economically destructive Zero COVID policy (and Zero COVID is unquestionably economically destructive). The CCP is the one political entity on the entire planet that is demonstrably more shortsighted than the Democratic Party here in the US.
Xi Jinping is obsessed with returning China to a Maoist ideology--which is to say a Marxist/Trotskyite/Legalist amalgam of apologia for the State as the sole arbiter of everything in society. Realpolitik psyops require a different flavor of psychopathy, one that is less ideological and more explicitly Machiavellian.
We should also remember that China has NEVER been good at either power projection or foreign policy. In that sphere Xi makes Putin look like a master of statecraft.
This is why I go with Hanlon's Razor in these matters. While malign intent is always a possibility, the full body of available data more often supports simple stupidity. Evil, at its core, is always fundamentally stupid by nature.
If China's previous draconic "zero COVID" protocols were even somewhat functional, the current population has had very little opportunity to develop natural immunity via previous infection. No natural immunity would crank up case rates nearly as much as antibody-dependent enhancement and other immune system destruction caused in other countries by the COVID shots.
Immunological naivete is certainly possible and even probable as a Zero COVID consequence. However, it's not enough of a consequence to explain the narrative.
The problem with immunological naivete as an explanation is that what's being reported is an order of magnitude greater than even the original Wuhan strain outbreak here in the US.
During that outbreak no one in general had immunity, natural or otherwise. There were still not the rates of infection and hospitalization being reported in China today. For that matter, the original outbreak here in the US did not match what was reported in China in 2020.
So while immunological naivete can and probably is a contributing factor, it's not an adequate explanation for the magnitude of divergence between COVID inside China and COVID outside China.
Either the narrative is wrong or there's something additional taking place in China.
I’m very confused re China’s vax status. Some sources say they’re highly vaccinated and others say very low. And no one seems to know what type are they using. The psy op is truly amazing to watch.
1 - The elderly (and thus the most vulnerable) are the demographic cohort that is the least vaccinated.
2 - The overwhelming majority of Chinese who are vaccinated received their shots over a year ago, and thus any immunity so acquired has mostly worn off.
3 - China's two principle COVID vaccines, SinoVac and SinoPharm--are whole inactivated virus vaccines similar in construction to the seasonal flu shot, and about as effective. The best results SinoVac has obtained against original Wuhan strain has been 51% (and that percentage is sketchy)
Neither SinoVac nor SinoPharm is considered to be effective against Omicron and descendant strains--and ALL of the lineages identified by China in the current outbreak are Omicron descendants.
Doesn't matter who funds them. What matters is are they a reliable data source. And the short answer is they are reliable for epidemiological data on COVID--they are essentially a data warehouse for country-level data obtained from individual public health agencies for the nations of the world.
Data is inherently non-ideological. It doesn't change merely because of the politics of the person funding the computers used to store the data.
In theory, the clownish hazmat suits should not impair the gathering and reporting of hospitalization and mortality data, nor diagnostic test data.
In theory.
However, the people who show up at hospital are real people, presumably with real illnesses. They are not hazmat clowns.
Thus by following what ordinary people are doing we may get a reliable snapshot of the severity of a disease outbreak. That much is basic epidemiology.
The problem in China is twofold: 1) the government is notorious for misrepresenting empirical data about events in China, and 2) China's preexisting censorship structures mean we have little more than anecdotal data outside of the "official" government metrics.
Thus we can assess to some degree the severity of the COVID outbreak in China, but we are limited in the precision and accuracy of the assessment.
Within those limits, however, we have a presentation of COVID inside China unmatched by anything outside China. And THAT is the "truth" that needs the greatest emphasis at this time.
So I've seen reports China used HCQ successfully in the beginning of covid. Is that no longer the case and what exactly are treatment protocols there? Seems to be a lot of "fever medications" that are sold out - I'm guessing tylenol (paracetamol) and similar which really don't help with covid. Can folks get their hands on IVM, HCQ, vit d, c, zinc and other drugs and supplements proven to help fight covid? I've seen images of glass opacities - are antibiotics not given to folks (covid often turns to bacterial pneumonia but not treated and patient dies). I hope they're not treating with paxlovid, merck, and remdesevir.
I don't have any specifics on China's "official" treatment protocols per se, but Pfizer did strike a deal to sell gobs of Paxlovid to China late last month.
And the Wuhan Institute of Virology applied for a use patent on Remdesivir at the outset of the initial Wuhan outbreak in early 2020--a fact which does much to further the bioweapon hypothesis.
Chinese pharmacies have been running out of ibuprofen and paracetamol, but their pharmaceutical manufacturers are presumably ramping up production to fill demand.
Interesting bit of irony about HCQ: Chen Erzhen, who claimed that 70% of Shanghai residents have contracted COVID in this wave of infection, was involved in a study which purported to show that HCQ was ineffective against COVID.
Which means, sadly, that it is highly unlikely the official hospital protocols in China utilize any of the "alternative" therapies that have been developed and discussed elsewhere. How much access Chinese citizens have either to Ivermectin or HCQ outside of the healthcare system, or how aware they are about the therapeutic benefits of Vitamin D/C/Zinc is still a question.
Here's a cynical view: What if the CCP (Xi) gave the directive to increase hospital admissions and decrease staffing in key areas (crematoriums, clinics, etc) as a psyop to convince Western elites that dropping Zero Covid policy was a mistake, and therefore, bait them into panicking all over again, to which they then respond by reintroducing self-destructive measures?
Two problems with that hypothesis, both of them lethal:
1) Most of the western healthcare "elites" already are convinced that some form of Zero COVID is the way to go. The lockdowns have eased in the west because of political and economic pressures, not because the elites had a sudden spasm of libertarianism.
2) The blank paper protests in China were real. The video footage confirms this. The abrupt and haphazard ending of Zero COVID is more consistent with Xi and the CCP surrendering to virus and to political pressures regarding Zero COVID. If any group were to be targeted by a "psyop", it would be the Chinese people themselves--and what filters through on social media suggests that even the Chinese people aren't buying into that.
Always remember that the image of the CCP as this paragon of long term planning is a complete and utter fiction which has NEVER been supported by the facts on the ground. Lack of planning is how they got the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Lack of planning and lack of demographic mathematics is how they got the suicidal One Child Policy. Lack of planning is how they got locked into the economically destructive Zero COVID policy (and Zero COVID is unquestionably economically destructive). The CCP is the one political entity on the entire planet that is demonstrably more shortsighted than the Democratic Party here in the US.
Xi Jinping is obsessed with returning China to a Maoist ideology--which is to say a Marxist/Trotskyite/Legalist amalgam of apologia for the State as the sole arbiter of everything in society. Realpolitik psyops require a different flavor of psychopathy, one that is less ideological and more explicitly Machiavellian.
We should also remember that China has NEVER been good at either power projection or foreign policy. In that sphere Xi makes Putin look like a master of statecraft.
This is why I go with Hanlon's Razor in these matters. While malign intent is always a possibility, the full body of available data more often supports simple stupidity. Evil, at its core, is always fundamentally stupid by nature.
I would suggest the following possibility:
If China's previous draconic "zero COVID" protocols were even somewhat functional, the current population has had very little opportunity to develop natural immunity via previous infection. No natural immunity would crank up case rates nearly as much as antibody-dependent enhancement and other immune system destruction caused in other countries by the COVID shots.
Immunological naivete is certainly possible and even probable as a Zero COVID consequence. However, it's not enough of a consequence to explain the narrative.
The problem with immunological naivete as an explanation is that what's being reported is an order of magnitude greater than even the original Wuhan strain outbreak here in the US.
During that outbreak no one in general had immunity, natural or otherwise. There were still not the rates of infection and hospitalization being reported in China today. For that matter, the original outbreak here in the US did not match what was reported in China in 2020.
So while immunological naivete can and probably is a contributing factor, it's not an adequate explanation for the magnitude of divergence between COVID inside China and COVID outside China.
Either the narrative is wrong or there's something additional taking place in China.
I’m very confused re China’s vax status. Some sources say they’re highly vaccinated and others say very low. And no one seems to know what type are they using. The psy op is truly amazing to watch.
China's official vaccination data suggests that ~90% of Chinese are "fully vaccinate."
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=People+fully+vaccinated&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=~CHN
There are a few caveats, however.
1 - The elderly (and thus the most vulnerable) are the demographic cohort that is the least vaccinated.
2 - The overwhelming majority of Chinese who are vaccinated received their shots over a year ago, and thus any immunity so acquired has mostly worn off.
3 - China's two principle COVID vaccines, SinoVac and SinoPharm--are whole inactivated virus vaccines similar in construction to the seasonal flu shot, and about as effective. The best results SinoVac has obtained against original Wuhan strain has been 51% (and that percentage is sketchy)
https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/the-sinovac-covid-19-vaccine-what-you-need-to-know
Neither SinoVac nor SinoPharm is considered to be effective against Omicron and descendant strains--and ALL of the lineages identified by China in the current outbreak are Omicron descendants.
https://asiatimes.com/2021/12/sinovac-efficacy-under-scrutiny-with-rise-of-omicron/
Xi Jinping and the CCP have been dead set against importing and using the mRNA inoculations.
Thanks! But this leads me to even more questions lol.
Also, Our Workd Data is funded by Gates and Musk foundation, to name a couple.
Doesn't matter who funds them. What matters is are they a reliable data source. And the short answer is they are reliable for epidemiological data on COVID--they are essentially a data warehouse for country-level data obtained from individual public health agencies for the nations of the world.
Data is inherently non-ideological. It doesn't change merely because of the politics of the person funding the computers used to store the data.
Good!
If we're asking questions then we're not being seduced by the narrative.
Never stop asking questions. (If I stopped asking questions, this Substack would cease to exist!)
These are also people who are masking compliant at nearly 100% which is also being ignored.
These are the same folks who produced videos featuring workers in hazmat suits, spraying down airport runways.
Can't imagine how you could piece together anything resembling the truth based on their output.
In theory, the clownish hazmat suits should not impair the gathering and reporting of hospitalization and mortality data, nor diagnostic test data.
In theory.
However, the people who show up at hospital are real people, presumably with real illnesses. They are not hazmat clowns.
Thus by following what ordinary people are doing we may get a reliable snapshot of the severity of a disease outbreak. That much is basic epidemiology.
The problem in China is twofold: 1) the government is notorious for misrepresenting empirical data about events in China, and 2) China's preexisting censorship structures mean we have little more than anecdotal data outside of the "official" government metrics.
Thus we can assess to some degree the severity of the COVID outbreak in China, but we are limited in the precision and accuracy of the assessment.
Within those limits, however, we have a presentation of COVID inside China unmatched by anything outside China. And THAT is the "truth" that needs the greatest emphasis at this time.
So I've seen reports China used HCQ successfully in the beginning of covid. Is that no longer the case and what exactly are treatment protocols there? Seems to be a lot of "fever medications" that are sold out - I'm guessing tylenol (paracetamol) and similar which really don't help with covid. Can folks get their hands on IVM, HCQ, vit d, c, zinc and other drugs and supplements proven to help fight covid? I've seen images of glass opacities - are antibiotics not given to folks (covid often turns to bacterial pneumonia but not treated and patient dies). I hope they're not treating with paxlovid, merck, and remdesevir.
I don't have any specifics on China's "official" treatment protocols per se, but Pfizer did strike a deal to sell gobs of Paxlovid to China late last month.
And the Wuhan Institute of Virology applied for a use patent on Remdesivir at the outset of the initial Wuhan outbreak in early 2020--a fact which does much to further the bioweapon hypothesis.
https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/ccpvirus-yes-it-is-bioweaponhtml
Chinese pharmacies have been running out of ibuprofen and paracetamol, but their pharmaceutical manufacturers are presumably ramping up production to fill demand.
Interesting bit of irony about HCQ: Chen Erzhen, who claimed that 70% of Shanghai residents have contracted COVID in this wave of infection, was involved in a study which purported to show that HCQ was ineffective against COVID.
Which means, sadly, that it is highly unlikely the official hospital protocols in China utilize any of the "alternative" therapies that have been developed and discussed elsewhere. How much access Chinese citizens have either to Ivermectin or HCQ outside of the healthcare system, or how aware they are about the therapeutic benefits of Vitamin D/C/Zinc is still a question.