The hell of "zero COVID"

In some ways, these unforgiving, misanthropic restrictions are specific to China. China is, of course, an authoritarian country – most of its rulers have few qualms about depriving people of their most basic freedoms. Also, the CCP has its political reputation to consider. As the Guardian reports, for the past 20-odd months, state media in China have pushed the message that the spread of Covid in other countries is down to ‘poor leadership and bad decision-making’. Abandoning Zero Covid now, and allowing community infection, would threaten the standing of President Xi and his administration. Most worryingly of all, precisely as a result of its Zero Covid policies – and also the fact that its vaccines are not as effective as Western-produced vaccines – China has low levels of population immunity against Covid. This is the trap of Zero Covid, as Australia and New Zealand have discovered: in the process of protecting the citizenry from infection, which is the justification for these intolerable policies, you hamper people’s biological ability to deal with Covid when it inevitably arrives.

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But in another, very important sense, Zero Covid is not just a ‘Chinese thing’. No, here in the supposedly free West, too, numerous experts and observers openly lobbied for Zero Covid policies, for the subjugation of liberty and the joys of life to a programme of ensuring that Covid could never gain a foothold in our society. ‘Zero Covid’, over the past year, has become a little like the campaign slogan ‘Defund the police’, in that the people who pushed this policy now deny that it is actually what they wanted. Just as BLM’s media supporters say ‘We didn’t really want to defund the police, you just don’t understand the nuances of our position’, so the Zero Covid lobby in the UK and elsewhere insist they didn’t actually want to enforce such severe restrictions that Covid cases would be reduced to zero. But the truth is, they did.

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