[Recorded on Thursday 14th September 2022.]
And we’re back! We’re back in my kitchen. We’re back by popular demand (well, sort of). And, most importantly, we’re so back with the #based @FeuxFollets. Last time, we discussed China’s response to SARS-CoV-2 in broad, almost gross, generality, focussing on masks, the situation now, and general compliance with lockdown measures. This time, we decided to focus in on the ZeroCOVID strategy itself and, inevitably, on the question of vaccination and mandates.
The qualifiers are the same as before: while she is a fount of wisdom on all things China and Chinese, most of what Feux says here is based on personal observations and anecdote, and so should be taken as opening questions rather than providing closed answers. However, again as before, here are some links and articles that she and I thought might be informative:
张一帆, '英美接种疫苗，阴谋论随之盛行', 环球时报, 15 December 2020 [link.]
Alexandra Stevenson, 'These Vaccines Have Been Embraced by the World. Why Not in China?', New York Times, 18 February 2022 [link.]
流芳, '观点周刊：中国诋毁辉瑞疫苗以掩盖自身疫苗的失败', rfi, 21 January 2021 [link.]
Keith Zhai, Chao Deng, and Sha Hua, '中国延缓批准BioNTech新冠疫苗，以维护对国产疫苗的信心', The Wall Street Journal, 31 August 2021 [link.]
Owen Jones, ‘Public support for lockdown measures is disintegrating - a new approach is needed’, The Guardian, 22 December 2021 [link.]
One thing that Feux and I dug into a bit was the different rationales underlying China’s “ZeroC0VID” and the West’s “Flatten The Curve” approaches. As I say in the chat above (and have said on this blog before), by late 2020/early 2021, the West’s lockdowns had become lockdowns-til-vaxx. An extraordinary suspension of freedoms was justified by the imminence of a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 that would ‘save’ us us from needing to live in socially-distanced fear of infection and contamination. And, it seems to me that this strategy received widespread buy-in because of a pre-existent, quasi-dogmatic Western faith in the efficaciousness and infallibility of anything called “vaccine”. It was easier, to coin a phrase, to imagine the end of the world than a vaccine not being safe-and-effective…
Now, while this faith in vaccination as the pandemic’s necessary end-point may have kept us locked down in Winter 2020/2021 and justified a barrage of …errr… questionable mandates, it may, paradoxically, also have saved us from further lockdowns in Winter 2021/2022. By that point, everyone who intended to get vaxxed had been (even doubly or triply so) and even erstwhile lockdown-supporters pushed back against the prospect of new stay-at-home orders and restrictions. With lockdown-til-vaxx, a deal had been struck and kept and to lockdown again was just not cricket.
As Feux notes above, the CCP’s ZeroC0VID approach also depended upon wide-spread buy-in from the people because when they eventually lost it, the strategy collapsed. However, she also notes that, unlike the West, Chinese consent was not conditional on the promise of vaccination - both at a political (the party placed little faith in either Sinovac or Western mRNA) and popular level (the Chinese do not share the West’s faith in the powers of vaccination). Instead, Feux suggests, the long shadow of SARS-CoV-1 (which was successfully eliminated) and a general faith in State paternalism probably played a similar role in the Chinese acceptance of ZeroC0VID to the one played by vaccine faith in the Western buy-in to lockdown-til-vaxx. As such, vaccines never played a leading role in China’s strategy - they were hardly mandated and, unlike in much of the West, new lockdowns were accepted post-roll-out.
All of which begs the following question: Why have mandates disappeared across most of the West? My current answer is that the vaccine’s failure to significantly reduce disease transmission undercut the mandate’s rationale and made them untenable (in this sense, we should perhaps be thankful that the vaccines weren’t more effective!). However, this remains an open question and I am interested in any thoughts that readers/listeners might have.
We hope you enjoy! If you have any ideas for other short chats (whether with Feux Follets or not) please leave them in the comments below.
§ Related Pieces:
Also, friend-of-the-blog, Daniel Hadas produced a great tweet thread about Feux Follets’ reasons for not wearing a mask:
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