The China syndrome

With no mRNA vaccines, China leaves lockdown and Covid behind in weeks - exactly the opposite of terrified Western media predictions. No wonder CNN etc are yet again ignoring reality.

The mRNA Covid jabs just suffered their most devastating takedown yet.

And they weren’t even being used.

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Remember how China ended its lockdowns in December and Omicron ripped through megacities like Beiijng, causing hospitals to collapse and killing millions of people?

How China begged the United States to deliver planeloads of mRNA shots overnight because its own vaccines had failed so catastrophically?

How waves of deaths continued for months?

How a nasty variant emerged from China’s undervaccinated population, worsening its misery and causing a new worldwide Covid wave?

How the Chinese economy staggered as hundreds of millions of sick workers stayed home, setting off supply chain disruptions even worse than 2020? How oil crashed and the world fell into recession?

How long Covid turned into a threat overnight, putting tens of millions of Chinese on disability?

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Oh, wait.

None of that happened.

Well, the first part - Remember how China ended its lockdowns? - did.

After three years of intermittent but very strict lockdowns, China ended its restrictions more or less overnight in December. The restrictions had hurt the economy and were even causing public protests, which are exceptionally rare in China.

Xi Jinping, China’s maximum leader (and by all accounts a lovely human being!) decided they had outlived their usefulness and the best way to get rid of them was all at once.

So he did. Dictatorship has its privileges.

But China’s abrupt reversal led to much weeping and gnashing of teeth from all the usual suspects in the media and on public health Twitter. To wit:

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(Surging fears in The Guardian:)

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(New variants in Bloomberg:)

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(The collapse of the entire healthcare system, you heard it here first!)

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The big concern of the hysterics was that CHINA HAD USED THE WRONG VACCINES, MMMMKAY?

Unlike the West, China had not gone with novel biotechnologies for its vaccines, instead relying on old-school inactivated virus jabs called CoronaVac and Sinopharm.

Those shots rely on simple principles that have hardly changed for generations. Viruses are grown, harvested, and “inactivated” with formaldehyde so they cannot invade cells and reproduce. Then they’re mixed with an “adjuvant” particle so that the immune system will notice and respond to them, and injected.

Essentially, inactivated virus vaccines give our immune systems an advance look at the entire virus without risking infection. (mRNAs work in a very different way, hijacking our cells; in some ways they are more comparable to a synthetic virus.)

But in their pivotal clinical trials in 2020, the Chinese vaccines did not seem to work as well to stop infection as the mRNA jabs from Pfizer and Moderna.

And because China had had almost no Covid infections after early 2020, it was virgin ground for Omicron. Worse, a huge number of Chinese were old enough to be at relatively high risk from Covid. China has about 100 million people over 70, including 30 million over 80.

As you know, Covid’s risks are incredibly age-stratified.

The original strains killed up 1 to 2 percent of people between 70 and 80 and up to 10 percent of people over 80. At those levels, China might have seen close to 5 million deaths of people over 70 - plus another million or more of people under 70.

Only the mRNAs could save the People’s Republic from that devastating fate, Western public health experts said.

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Let’s cut to the chase.

Two months later, nothing the doomsayers predicted came true.

Not even close.

No new variants. No mass waves of death. No societal disruption.

China has reported about 80,000 Covid deaths since December.

Yes, that figure are untrustworthy, and no one will ever know the real number. Yes, China had significant Covid deaths in December. Crematoria in major cities were much busier than normal. The New York Times speculated in mid-February that China might have had roughly 1 million deaths.

But China has over 1.4 billion people, and Omicron appears to have hit the entire country in a matter of weeks. In other words, the overall Omicron infection fatality rate in China was under 0.1 percent, or 1 in 1,000. That level is roughly comparable to (wait for it) the flu.

And those deaths appear to have occurred almost exclusively in the extremely elderly - not just people over 80, but those over 85 and 90.

Most striking of all, China now appears completely done with Covid.

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China’s miniscule overall Covid death rate and rapid exit from the epidemic has profound implications - which Western health bureaucrats and reporters are doing everything possible to ignore.

Based on the largest possible sample size, it suggests the decline in Covid deaths worldwide since early 2022 is due mostly to Omicron’s mildness. Vaccines and other treatments have played little if any role. (It also shows, once again, that Covid is a disease of the obese. China is far thinner than Western countries.)

But China’s experience tells an even more troubling story for the mRNA jabs.

The best national comparisons to China are not the United States or in Europe. They’re other Pacific countries, including Australia, South Korea, and Taiwan in particular.

Those nations also locked down very hard and avoided large Covid waves in 2020 and much of 2021 - then vaccinated their citizens before opening up. But they all faced repeated Covid waves in 2022, with significant Covid and excess non-Covid deaths all year.

The difference, of course, is that unlike China, Taiwan, Australia, and South Korea relied on mRNAs.

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The comparison is devastating for the mRNAs. It suggests that at best, at a national level, they work no better than inactivated virus vaccines against against Omicron (and all future Covid variants).

At best. Remember, the mRNAs are also 10 to 50 times as expensive as the Chinese vaccines, which on a global basis represents significant added cost - over $100 billion - for no apparent benefit.

But the biggest issue isn’t money. It’s that the mRNAs depend on a mechanism of action whose risks we do not completely understand and cause immune system changes that have unknown long-term effects.

Worse, excess deaths from all causes have been well above normal for over a year in most countries that used them, for reasons no one has adequately explained.

So the Chinese decision to rely on older, better-understood technology looks better by the day. Even if the Chinese vaccines are worse than the mRNAs at preventing Covid - and, again, the Chinese experience since December suggests otherwise - their overall safety profile is far superior, and they cost much less.

No wonder the China never allowed the mRNAs for its people.

Xi Jinping wins again.

Ask the Uighurs about that.