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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Powdered endangered species, the ones you always hear about. Those must be effective, otherwise the government wouldn't be trying to stop them.
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And based on conversations with Chinese friends of mine, most of the buyers of rare animal parts know it doesn't work. They're doing it to demonstrate their wealth and show off to their peers. In a world with Viagra and Cialis, why would anyone bother with ground up rhino horn?
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And so are the animals its made out of.
The really sad part is how much of Chinese medicine either doesn't work or is actively harmful. And it costs ¥¥¥¥¥¥¥.
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They did crack down! That's why it's so expensive.
CPC recently banned the sale of Pangolin animal products, that's a start...
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.