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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16082 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Has anyone been following the scenes in China?

The government has changed the definition of a COVID death, apparently to slice the death statistics after relaxing zero-COVID and cases surge. Omicron emerged last year as it ripped through Africa, and that variant seemed less dangerous (although more contagious) than its ancestors. It's suspected that it could be a subvariant of that. Also worth mentioning that China has ordered its first batch of foreign vaccines from Germany, but only for German expats living in China. Too early to tell and we don't have the full facts yet, but I won't be surprised if the situation is grimmer than the PRC government is willing to disclose.

On the other hand, it's amazing how the western mainstream media has reverted to parroting COVID-regime talking points again, after months of calling zero COVID insane. It reads like they're using it as an excuse to justify bringing back more autocratic measures at home, the coming weeks will be very telling.

China covid policy is (was?) an immense success unfortunately the rest of the world is too inept and criminal to react efficiently to covid entry points and therefore millions of humans die and quality of life, worldwide intelligence level and lifespan are put at an extreme and yet unknown risk. How many times will people catch covid in their own lifetime? How many percents of neurons/synapse lost? This is extremely worrying.

China has ordered its first batch of foreign vaccines from Germany

China is the biggest exporter of vaccine worldwide (2 billions ?), while occident was keeping them all for themselves and did not allow other countries to produce patented vaccines (well it maybe was allowed very late I don't recall exactly the timeline) china saved the majority of mankind regarding covid deaths.

While their vaccine was a bit less effective, with the newer variant it is on par if not better? (I haven't looked at the viral load metric, where mRNA vaccine have become entirely useless) see https://old.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/zq0x2h/after_2nd_and_3rd_dose_chinas_sinovac_reach/

Of course the best vaccine would probably be a combination of distinct ones. Also, let me remind the world that the Russian main vaccine is very competitive and was denied out of pure racism, although nowadays we have the ukrainian war narrative.

As for accounts of said racism I invite the reader, for example, to ask himself if he knows what was the biggest genocide during WW2.

As for anti-sino racism, while on the digression, I'll ask the reader who caused the Great Chinese Famine.

  • -40

China covid policy is (was?) an immense success unfortunately the rest of the world is too inept and criminal to react efficiently to covid entry points and therefore millions of humans die ...

You're rewriting history. China locked down intra-Chinese travel in January 2020 but left open foreign travel until March(!). A reasonable inference is that the Chinese leadership knew how bad it was in January and dissembled and misled for months and either wanted the virus to spread internationally or displayed callous disregard for that entirely predictable outcome.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how-china-locked-down-internally-for-covid-19-but-pushed-foreign-travel/

There is lots of data on efficacy of the different COVID vaccines, and Sinovac is mostly evaluated as among the worst.

reddit.com/r/sino is a cesspool of pro-CCP propaganda, and I am now skeptical of you for using it as an authoritative reference.

When deciding how to react to a pandemic, one must take the world as it is, not as one wishes it to be. China knew that there were six and a half billion other people in the world spread across two hundred other countries whose governments would react in various ways to the pandemic. It was not reasonable for it adopt a set of polices that relied on the rest of the world suppressing the pandemic as well as they claim to have done.

It was a given that they would have to deal with constant incursions of the virus back into the country, with increasing evolved contagiousness, forever. It was a given that any country that wanted to control the virus indefinitely had to come up with a solution that could be made permanent.

Unless China gives up and proves that their zero Covid policy was an almost complete waste, this is just the beginning of the nightmare it has imposed on its population.

Unless China gives up and proves that their zero Covid policy was an almost complete waste,

This is happening as we speak.

As for accounts of said racism I invite the reader, for example, to ask himself if he knows what was the biggest genocide during WW2.

Holocaust, 11 000 000 - 17 000 000 dead.

who caused the Great Chinese Famine

PRC, Mao in particular.

Holocaust, 11 000 000 - 17 000 000 dead.

Well I'm not an expert on holocaust, a quick google gave me a 5-6 million killed jews estimate and that is the authoritative one on wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#::text=Between%201941%20and%201945%2C%20Nazi%20Germany%20and%20its%20collaborators%20systematically%20murdered%20some%20six%20million%20Jews%20across%20German%2Doccupied%20Europe%3B%5Ba%5D

It seems the 11-17 number your refer is a mix of jewish kills and the killing of other minorities, especially Romani people

cf https://www.ilholocaustmuseum.org/holocaust-misconceptions/#::text=There%20were%2011%20million%20victims%20of%20the%20Holocaust%20(or%206%20million%20Jewish%20victims%20and%205%20million%20non%2DJewish%20victims)%C2%A0

I am not refering to the Jewish genocide but to one that is twice as big and that you never heard about because of racism:

It killed 11 million human beings, 11 million slavic civilian people for their ethnicity

https://studenttheses.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/75106

who caused the Great Chinese Famine

PRC, Mao in particular.

Well that is a misleading answer.

Mao had its flaws but the general direction of china made sense, they suffered from the century of humiliation, something that isn't taught in schools because of racism.

As a result they went from the first economic power worlwide to extreme poverty and had to make, very late, a transition to an industrial revolution (from a mostly agriculture based economy)

There has been flaws during this necessary transition, however people completely fail to understand the reason behind 99% of the deaths, an artificial one, deliberately chosen by the U.S.A and other occidental countries, a worlwide ban on exports to China. A worlwide ban of many technologies including the main disruption of the century, the discovery and production of fertilizers.

Therefore the death of all those human beings has for main and sufficient responsability the occidentals hegemonists and their will to bend China and froze them into the middle age.

The ignominy of the west is rampant everywhere and the ignorance of those crimes againsts humanity continue even today.

  • -24

I am not refering to the Jewish genocide but to one that is twice as big and that you never heard about because of racism:

You're on a board where people very often debate the Holocaust and other genocides - if you assume that "no one has ever heard of this" you are almost certainly wrong.

Mao had its flaws but the general direction of china made sense, they suffered from the century of humiliation, something that isn't taught in schools because of racism.

Again, Chinese history, including the "century of humiliation," is not some obscure topic no one here knows anything about.

You're getting reported a lot, and while most of those reports are because you're taking an unpopular ideological position (people are allowed to be Maoist apologists or PRC defenders here), you are also making a lot of casual assertions like "no one knows anything about this because of racism" that veer into consensus building and inflammatory claims without evidence.

Do not make assumptions about what people don't know and the reasons they don't know it, and if you want to argue that there are historical facts being suppressed because of racism, you need to actually back that up, not just assert it.

Hi, thanks for the heads up.

I agree I said the claim of racism with a bit too much insistance and that I shouldn't have used a universal quantifier "no one"

In case it wasn't clear, it was a figure of speech, I'm obviously not claiming at all litterally that no one knows about the slavic genocide but it is an emphasis to make people realize how strikingly underknown, undertaught and undertalked it is.

Context is key, did I say straight out of nowhere that the person I'm answering to did not know about the slavic genocide? No,

My initial comment was a question:

I invite the reader, for example, to ask himself if he knows what was the biggest genocide during WW2.

Then the person answering mostly failed the test as there was no mention of the slavic ethnicity being twice as big as the jewish ethnicity, which is the salient and useful fact.

They have mixed up the term holocaust (jew only genocide) with other ethnicity which hide the salient fact and defeat the purpose of the question.

Although my two salients statements, that china were induced extreme suffering because of the west especially fertilizer ban and unfair treaties, and that the biggest genocide concern the slavic ethnicity, are example of an asymetry in what matters to people from the west, the differentiating factor between slavic and jewish is none except the possibility of differential racism.

Therefore this asymetry of reporting and of caring of human suffering and of responsibility is an evidence based example of racism mechanisms or at best ethnicity selective apathy.

It would be hypocrisy to not admit to the asymetry of public commemoration between the two genocides. Shoah is a worlwide topic that is a basic fact.

Another piece of evidence is that I was mostly not taught those facts in my standard school (France) or they were mentionned for a minute.

The litteral title of the scholar paper research I linked on the slavic genocide is "The forgotten Holocaust"

I'm sure that make much more evidence than needed to get the point and have a civil discussion about it. But alas, people are polarized.

Yes some people in this community knows about those historic events contrary to my lazy claim however it is very likely that for the rest of people it should make them question their information feeds and their opinons about worlwide justice. Hence a rare and useful contribution.

Again I will avoid needless universal quantifiers in the future.

I wish people would come with intellectual curiosity and good faith.

pedantic note:

you're taking an unpopular ideological position

I am not doing any ideology here and I have stated no defense or approval for the PRC.

I am stating facts that can hurt beliefs in the anti-sino tribe. That does not make me a part of the pro-sino tribe.

I'm interested in reality, not ideological sects.

In case it wasn't clear, it was a figure of speech, I'm obviously not claiming at all litterally that no one knows about the slavic genocide but it is an emphasis to make people realize how strikingly underknown, undertaught and undertalked it is.

Apply a little nuance and good faith here yourself. I am aware you didn't mean literally no one else in the world but you knew about this subject. But you're coming in hot with a lot of statements about how "no one knows" things that in fact have been discussed here frequently.

I am not doing any ideology here and I have stated no defense or approval for the PRC.

I am stating facts that can hurt beliefs in the anti-sino tribe. That does not make me a part of the pro-sino tribe.

I'm interested in reality, not ideological sects.

I am not making assumptions about your "sect," but you are making too many ideological statements to be convincing as a non-ideologue.

I am not making assumptions about your "sect," but you are making too many ideological statements to be convincing as a non-ideologue.

Seeing the world for what it is does not imply having mild opinions about things, quite the contrary.

In many cases, what people might perceive as ideological can sometimes be instead simple debiasing statements.

If in the future you see me say potent statements without any evidence nor trivially accessible evidence then I would like to be noticed and to provide said evidence or otherwise change my mind and exit a sect I was unaware to be in.

Remind me again how the "first economic power" was humiliated for a century by mere white pigs?

I see multiple flaws in that single sentence:

Remind me again how the "first economic power" was humiliated for a century by mere white pigs?

Remind me

Given the implied snark I will assume there is no reminding because you never learnt about it in the first place

"first economic power"

The quote of course aims to reject the claim and even ridiculize it despite being true for most of history and shifting in great parts because of the century of humiliation

Here you can obvserve GDP over time: https://youtube.com/watch?v=xb5zYKYF3Xo

As you can see, china has been the #1 economic superpower consistently during the last centuries.

The century of humiliation is from 1839 to 1949 but even still apply to this days regarding territorial losses.

by mere white pigs

This is bad faith and low quality.

No need to attack white people as a group, after all sociopathic policies are mostly not derived by genetics.

So about the century of humiliation, China was militarily forced by western countries to sign treaties against its own will and interests and to secede territory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation

The British forced the government to let it massively drug its population via opium

Colonization of Hong kong and Macao

Sacking of palaces

Invasion of various large territories including outer Manchuria

And various treaties that ruined the economy

As a result, China lost its functional sovereignty and prosperity.

The mere white pigs as you say, have induced similar suffering in most parts of the world.

  • -10

The century of humiliation is from 1839 to 1949 but even still apply to this days regarding territorial losses.

What parts of China are still not under a nominally Chinese government, after the return of Hong Kong and Macau in the 1990s? Are we waiting for the absorption of Outer Mongolia and Jiaozhou into Chinese rule?

The British forced the government to let it massively drug its population via opium

Colonization of Hong kong and Macao

Sacking of palaces

Invasion of various large territories including outer Manchuria

And various treaties that ruined the economy

As a result, China lost its functional sovereignty and prosperity.

Even leaving aside that many of these wouldn’t reflect a drop in sovereignty or prosperity (sacking of Yuanmingyuan, cession of Hong Kong - notwithstanding that the cession of Macau was under the Ming 500 years ago!!!, and that that arrangement was amenable to all parties involved), or occurred late (e.g. Boxer indemnity being much more damaging than others prior, invasion of outer Manchuria was a failure by the Russians and only occurred in the 1930s by the Japanese), or are controversial in professional discourse (e.g. effect of opium smuggling in the long term), or that you’re intentionally using inflammatory rhetoric and wildly exaggerating historical fact to an astonishing degree (e.g. “forced the government to let it massively drug its population via opium” lol)…

Pray tell, what effect did you think the Taiping and the other rebellions in the 19th century have on Chinese prosperity?

What parts of China are still not under a nominally Chinese government, after the return of Hong Kong and Macau in the 1990s?

I already mentioned the salient one in my comment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Manchuria

invasion of outer Manchuria was a failure by the Russians and only occurred in the 1930s by the Japanese

What are you talking about?

The rest of your message is extremely flawed, to deny that the century of humiliation implied a loss of sovereignty and sovereign interest is beyond absurd and bad faith.

One can attempt to analyze and mitigate that some of the unequal treaties or actions were not that potent but that is overall an impossible goal.

See e.g: among many:

The Boxer Protocol of September 7, 1901, provided for the execution of government officials who had supported the Boxers, provisions for foreign troops to be stationed in Beijing, and 450 million taels of silver— more than the government's annual tax revenue—to be paid as indemnity over the course of the next 39 years to the eight nations involved.

I can't help but notice that despite your line by line reply you never addressed the question. Please speak clearly and explain how the "first economic power" was subjugated by inferior powers.

I don't think there is any possible kind/good faith interpretation to your question.

It just doesn't make sense and yet it was upvoted by 5 readers..

It should be painfully obvious that economic power is mostly hortogonal to military power, while there is some correlation it is obviously contingent.

It should be universally known and was explicited by one of my comments that China like the rest of the non western world was late regarding the industrial revolution, the design of war/killing machines and the use of powder/guns (which is ironic since Europeans originally imported that tech from China)

I didn't think it was useful to explain those things and why the west was able to militarily dominate the rest of the world.

Also the wars on china were a worldwide coalition of coercive powers, including Russia, the British empire, the French, and the U.S

I think people are being a bit unfair to you, but you're also saying a lot of dumb stuff yourself.

China definitely was a great economic power, despite that by the ~1500s Europe started to surpass them technologically and by the 1800s significantly surpassed them militarily. I agree with you there.

But Mao definitely had a lot of very stupid policies that led to a lot of deaths, e.g. the killing of the sparrows, or trying to have farmers make steel instead of grow crops. I think his most deadly mistakes were made of ignorance not malice, but they still weren't the West's fault.

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Putting aside that this is obviously a snark against extreme sinophilic (honestly, PRC-philic) history rewriting, this is actually an interesting question that has spawned an entire discipline of historical study. Not really as simple as “lol we better than you”.

(The Great Divergence debate has since expanded to include other polities and regions of the world, but IIRC for decades the majority of ink was spilled on Euro-Chinese comparisons.)

who caused the Great Chinese Famine

PRC, Mao in particular.

Well that is a misleading answer.

Mao had its flaws but the general direction of china made sense, they suffered from the century of humiliation, something that isn't taught in schools because of racism.

For anyone stumbling upon this thread and not sure what to believe, this is a case where the conventional wisdom is correct, Mao was a terrible leader and his misguided policies were responsible for the deaths of 30 million people from 1960-1962. You can say it was ignorance, not malice, that caused Mao's error, but the fact is that if he didn't know any better it is because he didn't want to know any better.

Well I'm not an expert on holocaust, a quick google gave me a 5-6 million killed jews estimate and that is the authoritative one on wikipedia

I specified number of victims of Holocaust, not victim count of Shoah, not a victim count of Jewish Holocaust dead.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims

(if there is a better word/term for overall extermination done by Germans around WW II less likely to result in confusion and is not annoyingly long then let me know)

I am not refering to the Jewish genocide but to one that is twice as big and that you never heard about because of racism:

It killed 11 million human beings, 11 million slavic civilian people for their ethnicity

I am considering it as part of Holocaust (and less than half of Holocaust dead were Jewish)

that you never heard about because of racism

I assure you that you are mistaken in this specific case, I am from Poland. Though in general I agree about blatant racism/politics/propaganda/failed PR in this area.

especially Romani people

nope, less than half million Romani were murdered (mostly because Germans run out of people to murder in this group after murdering about 50% - 75% of European population)

Soviet civilians were largest group of people murdered in Holocaust.

Around 5 000 000 Poles were murdered.

(in both groups there is large overlap with murder of Jews - around 1.3M of murdered USSR civilians were Jews, around 3M of murdered Poles were Jews)

There has been flaws during this necessary transition

That description is part hilarious and part horrifying.

the reason behind 99% of the deaths, an artificial one, deliberately chosen by the U.S.A and other occidental countries, a worlwide ban on exports to China. A worlwide ban of many technologies including the main disruption of the century, the discovery and production of fertilizers.

Well no. Great Chinese Famine and Holodomor and similar catastrophes were primarily caused by murderous communist rule.

Backyard furnaces, four pests, pressure to blatantly falsify reports, Lysenkoism including deep plowing etc and so on. Describing it merely as "flaws" is an absurd denial.

worlwide ban on exports to China

Do you have any sources? From what I remember one of problems was exporting food while millions starved to death, so presumably they also imported something. But I may misremember this one.

The Holocaust refers specifically to the murder of Jews by the Axis powers during the Second World War.

I have often heard it used to refer to all the systematic exterminations by the Nazis in World War 2.

That may be, but it's an incorrect usage of the term.

I don't know what you mean by that.

More comments

I've seen various attempts to expand the definition of "the Holocaust" to refer to all civilian deaths caused by German aggression; directly and indirectly. I think it's not a very rigorous approach. Academic historians generally use the term solely to refer to the persecution of European Jewry by Germany (and its allies).

There’s a whole Wikipedia article for all the different names.

Probably the most interesting part is that “holocaust” referred at some point to the burnt sacrifices at the Jewish Temple, making its use to refer to the murder of Jews and industrial burning of their bodies an abominable irony.

Do you have any sources? From what I remember one of problems was exporting food while millions starved to death, so presumably they also imported something. But I may misremember this one.

No sources from me, but I don’t think you misremember this one. IIRC the PRC was exporting food to Africa during that time and refused any foreign aid (I believe there was a Japanese offer at one point that was rebuffed, amongst other things). As far as I know, the Great Leap Forward was an entirely home-grown disaster, no foreign intervention needed.

Probably trivially checkable, too, now that I think about it.

A pity. I really hoped China's eventual capitulation to some-COVID would have marked a conclusive end to this saga. Ultimately though I'm not as worried as once I might have been, in between shortages of vital resources and inflation central governments do not really have the political capital for hygiene theatre that they did last year.

I don't know about other Western countries, but at least in Finland, the media is not really as much "reverting to parroting COVID-regime talking points" as it is just putting out an occasional story on China like it would do about any other mid-importance news event, ie. some of the stories might be more extensive than others but it really is not major news compared to Ukraine War and how the European energy crisis shows in Finland and the various struggles inside the rickety government and other such matters.

China giving up the measures really doesn't come off to me as anything beyond the final nail in the Zero-Covid coffin - to those willing to use an openly, nakedly authoritarian country as an example, China was really the last attempt to prove that Zero-Covid is even possible to maintain for an indefinite amount of time (because, really, at this point, what would be the alternate? Vaccines are already here), and it quite evidently isn't. My read is that China has probably been looking for a good narrative to offer a way out of these measures for some time.

At this point it's less that they were willing to continue these measures indefinitely but that they were ironically too successful in keeping Covid out and had to maintain these measures even in the face of possible investor disinterest in investing in a country where anything might be closed completely at a moment's notice, and the anti-measures protest offered as good a narrative as they might get, a sort of a "make me do it" scenario, even if that particular phrase is probably apocryphal.

Of course, at this point Zero Covid is generally treated as a marginalized fringe position anyway. Perhaps not as marginalized and fringe as antivaxxery, but still not the proper position for people following the public opinon (since, again, the proper position for those people is just not caring very much.)

Whatever actual criticisms of China I've seen generally are just of "China bad whatever it does" Cold War 2 stuff, or implicitly contrast China's sudden end of measures with Western process of ramping them out more gently (indeed, one might argue that's what they've done since lockdowns were ended in Spring/Summer 2021 - the vaxx passes were sold as a gentler alternative, after all.) We'll see what happens, of course, though there's no guarantee of accurate reporting from China anyway.

It reads like they're using it as an excuse to justify bringing back more autocratic measures at home, the coming weeks will be very telling.

Are you making a formal prediction here, or something else?

China giving up the measures really doesn't come off to me as anything beyond the final nail in the Zero-Covid coffin - to those willing to use an openly, nakedly authoritarian country as an example, China was really the last attempt to prove that Zero-Covid is even possible to maintain for an indefinite amount of time (because, really, at this point, what would be the alternate?

Looks more like they played cooperate in a prisoners dilemma. We know what the Nash Equilibrium is.

Cooperate - lock down hard so the virus can't spread or evolve

Defect - semi-random theatrics and half-hearted lockdowns that minimize death toll and economic burden

If you cooperate while everyone else defects, you pay all the burden while everyone else evolves new variants and transmits it back to you.

Africa was never really affected much by COVID, lockdown or no. It's a disease that hits the old and fat hardest, it targets wealthy countries.

I take your point with state capacity though, even supposedly well-prepared countries like the UK and US performed dismally. But there was no real effort made in the West until it was way too late.

I remember being half-heartedly asked if I'd been to Wuhan in Feb 2020 before I went to on-campus university. I could've simply lied - as many Chinese students are known to do when it comes to academic integrity. In what universe was that a valid and effective method of preventing viral spread! People circulated some Economist article that was saying 'the flu is a bigger concern' in one of our courses. That article disappeared quickly from the reading list!

Would it have been so hard to shut down flights from China in January? The Chinese had zero warning time before it was upon them and they managed to squelch it up until Omicron. We had warning time and squandered it.

Africa was never really affected much by COVID, lockdown or no. It's a disease that hits the old and fat hardest, it targets wealthy countries.

Elias point isn't that Africa would be harmed by COVID without massive lockdowns, he was disputing the implications of your game theory claim. And I agree, I think your argument doesn't work at all.

You called aggressive lockdowns the cooperative move, which implies that aggressive lockdowns would lead to a better outcome if everyone who could make that move did. But this is not true. The only way widespread aggressive lockdowns could lead to a better outcomes is if it resulted in COVID being entirely eliminated.

Elias' point is that there are many players (countries) in the game who are not capable of making the move you call cooperation. Even if every country capable of long lasting China style lockdowns actually did implement them, the virus would have plenty of reservoirs outside of those powerful countries. Many regions on Earth simply could not maintain strict lockdowns, so the virus would remain there. As you point out, those regions would not have particularly bad outcomes, as they are generally young, but that doesn't stop the virus from spreading there, it only lowers its death toll. So eventually, the powerful countries capable of strict lockdowns would remove those lockdowns and the virus would quickly return, spread from the reservoirs in poorer countries. Exactly what happens to China when it lowers it's guard would happen everywhere else, COVID would rip through the population, a population that is notably now more vulnerable to the virus because the strict lockdowns they've endured have prevented anyone in the population from developing natural resistance from surviving an infection.

The game as you are describing has these features:

-The cost of "cooperating" is extremely high.

-The benefit of cooperation only occurs if almost all players cooperate.

-A large portion of the players in the game are not capable of choosing to cooperate.

That is a game where choosing to do what you call "cooperate" is strictly the wrong choice. And in a situation where the cost of choosing to cooperate is borne by vast numbers of real people, it is not at all a benevolent choice as cooperation usually implies.

As the virus cannot be eradicated by strict lockdowns, all that can be achieved is delaying the inevitable deaths from the virus - this a fact clearly illustrated by exactly what happens to China when they reduce their anti covid protocols. Maybe you could argue that at least for the period that strong powers are maintaining strict lockdowns there will be a lower potential for the virus to evolve, but this is still simply delaying the inevitable. Eventually the lockdowns will have to be loosened, the virus will rip through the mostly unexposed populations, and we will be back to the exact same place we started. At which point the virus will start evolving and spreading as normal.

The only case in which strict widespread lockdowns would make sense is if the major world powers decided to essentially invade the entire world and impose lockdowns on the countries that couldn't otherwise afford to implement them. Something that would be unthinkably expensive and difficult, and also would be incredibly bloody and evil.

Covid lockdowns have a place, and that is when a local area's hospitals are overwhelmed. At that point, strict localized lockdowns make sense in order to buy time for the hospitals to deal with their current patient load and maybe accumulate more resources for the future. But strict wide lockdowns do not make sense for covid, and viewing them as a benevolent move doesn't make sense when a large portion of player simply cannot choose to cooperate.

The only way widespread aggressive lockdowns could lead to a better outcomes is if it resulted in COVID being entirely eliminated.

Good point, argument conceded.

Nice. Thanks for responding.

I wish we'd gotten some formal acknowledgement from the "if you're not zero-covid you want grandma to die" people that the "sensible position that all sensible people agree on" has reversed.

Because I still see them bring it up when they want to bash anti-lockdown people, blaming their noncompliance for COVID not being eradicated.

I wish we'd gotten some formal acknowledgement from the "if you're not zero-covid you want grandma to die" people that the "sensible position that all sensible people agree on" has reversed.

But the zerocovidists I mentioned are already fringe, a challenger faction, outside of the normie consensus - now more than ever, of course, but even during the period when there were active COVID measures they tended to be the ones forming organizations like iSage etc, always suspicious that the government is going halfway with measures and planning to drop them for "herd immunity" at any phase. In Finland the local ones have at this point moved on to openly conspiracy-theory speculation on how the Finnish government's policy of only offering the second booster to select groups (over-60s and/or underlying complications, basically) just might be a part of some secretive vaccine study with Finns as a test group for not vaccinating the great majority (with a second booster.)

In this sense, yes, they usually do acknowledge that the "sensible position that all sensible people agree on" has reversed, and state so openly - in other words, that the normie consensus where they don't place themselves has dropped even the insufficient measures enacted and is now barging head-first into permanent Covid apocalypse with mounting amounts of long covid etc.

On the other hand, it's amazing how the western mainstream media has reverted to parroting COVID-regime talking points again, after months of calling zero COVID insane. It reads like they're using it as an excuse to justify bringing back more autocratic measures at home, the coming weeks will be very telling.

The media tends to (a) focus on problems and (b) suggest the simplest/vaguest possible solutions for these problems, such as can be condensed into a brief opinion piece, insinuation in an article, or editorial spin in a newcast.

So "zero covid is insane, China should open up" is an easy spin when China is doing zero covid and "letting covid rip is insane, China should be more careful" is an easy spin when it's not.

Great point, the narrative must fit within the shrinking attention span of the decadent reader.

China not using their zero COVID strategy to vaccinate the population with Pfizer/Moderna/J&J vaccines is puzzling. I was under the impression the entire goal of zero COVID was to buy time to vaccinate the populous. The PRCs decisions remain a mystery to me.

This is only puzzling if you think the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are highly effective.

And that the Chinese communist party has the welfare of their people as their top priority.

Or that

Personally think you’d have to believe CCP level propaganda to think Pfizer and Moderna are not highly effective for high risk groups to protect against the most serve outcomes/death.

That is quite the change in positioning relative to their initial billing. It might even be true, but it doesn't do much at all if the goal is something akin to zero COVID, particularly if the pricing would be anything like what Western nations paid.

Both unfortunately and fortunately, this is almost certainly wrong. That may be the mainstream media narrative, but it's the result of a little bit of bad science and a whole lot of bad science reporting. The science is tricky because a lot of different things are happening at once: vaccine rollout, vaccines waning, variants changing, population getting infected, etc. But despite really promising initial apparent effectiveness against infection, we have every reason to believe herd immunity against coronaviruses is impossible because the human immune system's immune protection from infection (i.e. mostly antibody based) wanes too quickly (as opposed to protection from severe disease which appears to be more driven by long-lived T cells). The original studies were misleading because they didn't have the time to look at long enough after vaccination.

The fortunately part is that it doesn't appear the virus has changed enough to noticeably evade the vaccines (by which I mean 3 doses of one of the mRNA vaccines) at all. The reduced effectiveness against Omicron appears to be due to the virus being better at evading the immune system not due to a mismatch between the vaccine and the virus. Although that's difficult to tell because it's hard to find an entirely immune naive individual to expose to Omicron (either the actual virus or a vaccine). From that perspective, China would actually be an interesting place to do some reason and get some more solid data... but that doesn't seem likely to happen.

Source: listening to a lot of TWiV. Apologies, writing in a rush, so not tracking down good specific episodes.

The reduced effectiveness against Omicron appears to be due to the virus being better at evading the immune system not due to a mismatch between the vaccine and the virus. Although that's difficult to tell because it's hard to find an entirely immune naive individual to expose to Omicron (either the actual virus or a vaccine).

One approach: why not engineer a new virus that the vaccine doesn't protect against and that mimics Omicron's ability to evade the immune system? It could give us deep insights into future pandemics.

One approach: why not engineer a new virus that the vaccine doesn't protect against and that mimics Omicron's ability to evade the immune system? It could give us deep insights into future pandemics.

"Hey we've made cancer airborne and contagious, you're welcome! We're science - we're all about coulda, not shoulda."

From that perspective, China would actually be an interesting place to do some reason and get some more solid data... but that doesn't seem likely to happen.

I feel that China has already done more than enough research on novel corona viruses.

This is a cheap shot at China. It's of course possible to research corona viruses without doing gain of function research.

The initial billing was in respect to a virus that is now extinct. The vaccines were super effective against the original strain of COVID. If we had managed to roll them out globally in March of 2021, COVID would likely have been eradicated.

No, there's no way. Far, far too many animal reservoirs, and even when the vaccines were effective the longevity of the immunity was too short. Then there's the question of whether there would have been a similar number of cases but a much higher proportion of asymptomatic ones (i.e. the debate over whether the vaccine actually provided sterilizing immunity or just decreasing symptoms below the threshold of detectability).

Maybe if we had remarkably broad monitoring procedures (not feeling great? Swab in your bathroom, stick it in this tube and get same-day next gen sequencing!) that sounded the alarm much sooner after a new pathogen emerges we could prevent it. The experience from this pandemic killed that idea for a generation or two, though.

Mystery solved then, right? The CCP doesn't need to drop $50 billion on Western vaccines that are marketed on the basis that they are "highly effective for high-risk groups to protect against the most severe outcomes and death", particularly when doing so would be a declaration that they're unable to produce their own equivalent. This isn't a confusing policy decision.

particularly when doing so would be a declaration that they're unable to produce their own equivalent

I think that this is an important addition to your initial explanation.

The CCP might be willing to lose face if Western vaccines could e.g. reduce transmission to a minimum, but not to save a relatively marginal number of lives whose deaths won't be officially attributed to covid anyway.

My assumption is that the ccp either believes their own propaganda with respect to the quality of their vaccines OR they are simply refusing to import western vaccines out of some kind of misguided national pride. I’d love to know if the leadership and other important Chinese officials have used moderna or phizer vaccines (not that we are ever likely to find this out but it would be a great example of revealed preferences)

If the entire population is "up to date" with the vaccine doses, and the state imposes no lockdown, and given that vaccines do not confer 100% immunity, more will die (at least due to covid) than if house arrest is permanent.

The covid-related deathtoll from house-arrest-until-collective-immunity-is-achieved probably is only a low, but preventing the virus ever spreading would be even lower.

Some may claim that indefinite house arrest without probable cause would cause other health issues, or in some way be contrary to human rights, but ones goal is to make covid-related deaths as low as possible, everything else be damned, I see no better way.

"We don't care how many people die of despair, so long as they don't die of Covid" was a mainstream position in the West until early 2022 as well.

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