China’s rejection of Western vaccines stoked its looming “zero covid” crisis
“When I took the first [covid] vaccine, I had some symptoms, like I felt faint, so I will not do it again unless I understand more about the risks,” 73-year-old Chen Zhigang, a Beijing resident, told The Washington Post. He has turned down additional doses of the vaccine despite being part of a government-organized volunteer group that went door to door urging people to get vaccinated in early 2021.
“China has painted itself into a corner,” Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Irvine, said in an email. “The idea that the covid pandemic will be the 1918 flu, and that countries can just ‘hunker down for a year,’ has proven to be a mirage.”What happens next is unclear, but most experts agree that suddenly loosening restrictions would result in a public health disaster.
The government’s strategy has in part been affected by the experience of Hong Kong, which — like mainland China — cemented a formidable zero-covid strategy early in the pandemic, enjoying few cases despite relatively low vaccination rates among the elderly. But when the city’s defenses were breached in late 2021 by a spiraling outbreak, hospitals were slammed and fatality rates shot to one of the highest levels in the world at the time.
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