Is China's Fear of Covid Justified?

Look at Hong Kong to see China's future

Before you read the rest of this article, please watch this brief video about China’s desperate and obviously non-working attempts to keep Covid at bay. Try to watch the whole thing.

This is a crowded line of screaming and heavily breathing people with useless masks on, jammed together for mandatory daily Covid tests:

Songpinganq @songpinganq

@sleeplessincol2 Cross-Infection! Across China , millions and millions of people are huddling together to do daily Covid test , to get negative PCR test results , to keep their movement licenses-QR code vaccine passports valid ( green ) , to be able to buy food and work tomorrow. 2022/03/20

The absurdity of this act, exasperation of the guards, and desperation of the people is very palpable. You can feel that the situation is far from Covid being under control. The crowd, packed like sardines, people breathing heavily and inevitably infecting each other, looks ominous.

It frankly looks like final days before China gives up.

The above is typical for daily scenes involving mitigation measures. The authorities are welding multifamily apartment building doors shut, locking up workers in factories (where they all infect each other), etc. I am not linking to any gross stuff that I came across.

I do not like the Chinese government in the least and would never live there. But I found myself repeatedly asking myself, and others, why is the Chinese government doing this. The possibilities are:

• This is just a totalitarian exercise in prestige keeping, enforcing Digital ID and tracking of citizens, and showing the world how China is so successful at “Zero Covid” under the supreme ruler Xi Jinping

• Chinese Government knows more about Covid than the rest of the world - because it had a hand in creating it - and fears unspecified long term consequences of Covid

• Covid is uniquely deadly to the Chinese ethnicity due to certain interactions with genetics of the Chinese people, or due to ADE from China’s inactivated virus vaccine.

Totalitarianism

I try to not write excessively about social issues for many reasons. China is a very un-free state. It has control over the Internet (the great firewall of China), it censors Internet forums, and it requires registration of real names for anyone posting any Internet comments.

Chinese government is a pioneer and instigator of many policies promoted by the “World Economic Forum”, such as

• Digital ID

• Digital Currency

• Censorship against “misinformation”

• Mandatory vaccinations with a vaccine that is unsatisfactory

• Use of AI in law enforcement

• Social Credit Scores

As such, a pretense of “fighting a pandemic” is a very convenient cause for Xi Jinping to build an enormous infrastructure for controlling China’s citizens. As a former citizen of a totalitarian state, I understand how it happens. It is normal for a dictatorship.

However, what is happening in China right now, specifically the scale of lockdowns, cannot be explained just by authoritarian craziness. The disruption to China’s economy from tens of millions of workers locked out, or locked in, is so huge that it threatens the grandeur and global aspirations of the Chinese state. We need to search beyond political motives.

After all, if they just needed to advance government control, they always could stop sooner.

So, what else?

What does China Know about COVID?

We know three key facts about “Origin of Covid-19”

• It officially appeared in Wuhan, China, where the Wuhan Institute of Virology is located

• Sars-Cov-2 does seem to be an engineered virus with elements of HIV and Swine Flu virus, as well as patented genetic code from Moderna’s 2017 patent, and much more.

• China engaged in an extensive cover-up operation, deleting virus articles, uploading fake genomes of an imaginary “RatG-13” virus, paying scientists to lie about Covid origin, attempting to buy off WHO, etc

All of the above suggests that the Chinese know more about Covid, than they are letting on. It is possible that they were aware, from the beginning, that Covid infections have hidden, but far reaching destructive effects against our immune systems or something else. Such an explanation would make Chinese mitigations seem less crazy (and make the West look stupid).

It is also possible, as Dan Sirotkin pointed out, that Sars-Cov-2 was an attempt at creating a “live attenuated vaccine” against a highly pathogenic virus that is unknown to us, but MAY be known to China. As this LAV virus tends to deattenuate to its original form, it may be on the way to regaining full virulence as a whatever the secret virus was, that China was attempting to create a vaccine against. (again, this supposes that Sars-Cov-2 virus was developed as a “live vaccine”).

While the above seems possible, I do not have enough evidence to delve deeply into this topic. I love thinking idly about possibilities, but do not want to tire out my readers with unfounded suspicions.

Sars-Cov-2 is unlikely to be a China-only product, and very possibly the Chinese were duped into creating a Chinese-targeting virus by Ralph Baric of UNC. (see below)

Sars-Cov-2 was also possibly brought to Wuhan from elsewhere to cover its true origin. This is impossible to know with certainty without finding more evidence.

Covid has so many mysteries, that one would be well advised against assuming too much and I recommend to keep an open mind as to the origin of Sars-Cov-2 or “what it actually is”. As I said earlier, if someone says “I know where Covid came from and what it is”, is either a liar, a fool, or the person who did it.

Covid-19 may be a Disease Disproportionately Affecting Chinese People

Here we actually have much more data to work with. Chinese people may be disproportionately more likely to die or become severely ill from Covid.

Additionally, the so called “inactivated virus” Chinese vaccines are known to be prone to developing “antibody dependent enhancement”, or ADE.

I remember an article from 2020 showing that “Asian Americans” are at greater risk of Covid complications.

The above says that San Francisco “Asian Americans” are almost three times as likely to die of Covid-19 as whites. Mind you, most Asian Americans in San Francisco are of the Chinese ethnic origin. Another article from 2021 says the same thing:

This should at least give us a hint that it is possible that Covid-19 has a more severe effect on Asian Americans. While discrimination and other such things exist, blaming all of the excess mortality on “discrimination” may be an easy cop-out and a way not to ask difficult questions.

Incidentally, to illustrate this, a disturbing scenario is currently unfolding in Hong Kong. I wrote about it before. Hong Kong is an autonomous territory of China, that is populated by the ethic Chinese people. The entire world is surprised by how many Hong Kongers are dying.

Bad News from Hong Kong

My best estimate of case fatality rate, based on worldometer data, applying a 14-day lag between cases and deaths, is 1%, based on cases ending on Mar 4 and deaths ending on March 18. 1% is a huge rate for Omicron! This rate, of course, will change as more data comes in.

Mind you, this is in a Westernized, relatively wealthy, and highly “vaccinated” area. This fatality rate is several times that of the UK or USA, which were hit very hard.

It is possible that this higher fatality rate is also realized because Covid-19 disproportionately affects persons of Chinese ethnicity. In addition, Hong Kong has a mysterious new variant “BA.2 + S:I1221T”, which inexplicably took over the entire territory and is at about 100% of cases! This mysterious variant is not seen much anywhere, for now, except that in Japan it also rose to 8% prevalence and it is at 1% in Australia.

The odd 2020 videos of people “collapsing in the streets of Wuhan” may be fake, or not, but it is also possible that Wuhan was hit very hard by the first wave for the above reasons.

As a speculative note, it is also possible that this new variant causes Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) with the “inactivated virus” Chinese vaccine. Such inactivated virus vaccines are known to cause ADE from time to time:

While the article I am citing shows risk of ADE or VAERD in whole-virus vaccines, it also makes it clear that these concerns did not materialize — up to the time the article was written, of course.

Chinese inactivated virus vaccines are known for poor effectiveness (not that mRNA vaccines are any more effective) and are unlikely to protect the population. China has mandatory vaccination and that does not stop the pandemic on the mainland.

If mainland China ends up having a 1% fatality rate from Covid, and succumbs to the virus, it may end up killing 14 million Chinese people. People in China smoke a lot, live in crowded conditions, and many cities have terrible environmental conditions. China is not Hong Kong and, therefore, even more people could die due to worse health care.

I hope that nothing seriously terrible happens in China, of course, but the latest developments are worrisome.