(I promise I’m not concern-trolling here, or JAQ-ing off or whatever the appropriate phrase is—just admitting to a vague worry that I suspect and hope is unrealistic. Feel free to downvote me for stupidity, but please also leave a reply explaining why my concerns are dumb.)
The Chinese government’s continued super-cautious approach to covid, at a time when vaccines are widely available and permanent eradication seems impossible, makes me worry that it has reasons to expect e.g. worse long-term effects from covid infection than the rest of the world currently expects.
I get that the government has invested a lot of political capital in its covid-zero policy. But I don’t get why, now that continuing down that road seems at best extremely costly, and quite possibly doomed to imminent failure, it hasn’t pivoted to a message like ‘our policy was a success; we saved our people from getting covid without the protection of vaccines; now, with a health system fortified in all the appropriate ways thanks to the time that our sacrifices bought us, we make an orderly transition to living with the virus’.
There seems to be a serious risk that it’ll have to make that shift very soon anyway—and surely it would have benefited from getting ahead of the reality, rather than being seen to fail and lose control.
One possible explanation for this would be a belief that the cost of letting covid run rampant is much higher than generally believed. (And perhaps also a belief that effective mitigation via superior vaccines or treatments is possible, but will take more time.)
So are there any plausible ways in which the Chinese government (due, I suppose, to secret knowledge about the origins of the virus) could still be ahead of the rest of the world in understanding its long-term effects, despite two years of open study (but, despite this secret knowledge, not yet able to produce a sufficiently effective vaccine or treatment)?
The reason I don’t find this explanation satisfying is that it didn’t need to be a ‘failed’ policy; the policy was very successful in suppressing/eliminating the virus during the first couple of years, while vaccines were developed, treatments improved, and uncertainty about severity reduced.
Did the Chinese government really intend to keep covid out of the country forever? At least since the emergence of Omicron it must have been clear how difficult and costly that would be.
And if ‘failure’ in that sense is inevitable, why not get ahead of the news and celebrate the success of the early response, while framing the next phase as necessary and at least partially controlled, rather than letting it look like defeat and a loss of control?
Gwern writes elsewhere in this comment section that this may be a critical and precarious year in Xi Jinping’s career. So perhaps the simplest explanation is that he is desperate to defer any appearance of failure or weakness, believing that he is vulnerable now but will soon be in a better position to ride out the consequences.
The Chinese government’s continued super-cautious approach to covid, at a time when vaccines are widely available and permanent eradication seems impossible, makes me worry that it has reasons to expect e.g. worse long-term effects from covid infection than the rest of the world currently expects.
There are a lot of bad reasons to have such expectations. China’s media spend two years speaking about how COVID-19 did a lot of damage in the West but didn’t in China because of the great CCP policy.
In authoritarian countries the elite are affected by the government propaganda as well.
I suppose, to secret knowledge about the origins of the virus) could still be ahead of the rest of the world in understanding its long-term effects
That’s not how things work. You don’t develop a good understanding of long-term effects by understanding the origin of the virus. Especially you don’t without a healthy scientific debate.
I expect you’re right, but can you elaborate? For the sake of discussion, suppose it was accidentally released but deliberately created. Couldn’t the ‘designers’ of such a virus have knowledge about its capacities that might elude outside researchers?
To understand the long-term impacts of a disease or drug you have to study what it does in humans. That’s why a lot of drugs that were promising to the developer of the drug don’t live up to their promises in clinical trials.
There’s information that you gain in the design of a drug that’s useful to know which questions to ask when you study the drug in humans, but clinical studies in humans are the most important source of information.
Given the pressures that exist in China to fudge numbers, any internal government statistics that the Chinese do have are likely not very trustworthy. Very smart people in the Chinese party know that.
Related theory is that they’re planning for a more dangerous disease to be released in the future, either accidentally or on purpose, and they feel the need to perfect their zero-[disease] protocol now. They can’t accept a superficial failure with covid because that means accepting a critical failure with the next thing, especially if they’re not so good at making vaccines.
Why the heck would they want to do that, considering how much COVID is clearly costing them? I don’t see any rational actor looking at the situation and being like “what we need right now to invigorate the economy is a more deadly virus”…
Practically, the Chinese government’s response to their biosafety people is: ‘You shouldn’t do that dangerous research in biosafety II labs the way you did in Wuhan. To get you to stop doing that, we give you a lot of money to build a lot of biosafety III and biosafety IV labs’.
Without openly admitting that there was a lab leak in Wuhan, they might not see other moves that are currently viable.
The problem with that policy is that the researchers in those biosafety III and biosafety IV labs are likely going to want to do dangerous prestigious work. There are strong pressures to create research results and China does not know how to teach their researchers safety culture.
It’s plausible that there are people high up in the Chinese party who do think there’s a good likelihood that there will be more screw-ups and lab leaks in the future because they don’t trust the biosafety people but who don’t see another path to take.
I can’t speak for the other commenter, but ‘planning for’ might have been intended in the sense of ‘planning to respond to’ (or at least to have been ambiguous between that and the more sinister meaning)
(I promise I’m not concern-trolling here, or JAQ-ing off or whatever the appropriate phrase is—just admitting to a vague worry that I suspect and hope is unrealistic. Feel free to downvote me for stupidity, but please also leave a reply explaining why my concerns are dumb.)
The Chinese government’s continued super-cautious approach to covid, at a time when vaccines are widely available and permanent eradication seems impossible, makes me worry that it has reasons to expect e.g. worse long-term effects from covid infection than the rest of the world currently expects.
I get that the government has invested a lot of political capital in its covid-zero policy. But I don’t get why, now that continuing down that road seems at best extremely costly, and quite possibly doomed to imminent failure, it hasn’t pivoted to a message like ‘our policy was a success; we saved our people from getting covid without the protection of vaccines; now, with a health system fortified in all the appropriate ways thanks to the time that our sacrifices bought us, we make an orderly transition to living with the virus’.
There seems to be a serious risk that it’ll have to make that shift very soon anyway—and surely it would have benefited from getting ahead of the reality, rather than being seen to fail and lose control.
One possible explanation for this would be a belief that the cost of letting covid run rampant is much higher than generally believed. (And perhaps also a belief that effective mitigation via superior vaccines or treatments is possible, but will take more time.)
So are there any plausible ways in which the Chinese government (due, I suppose, to secret knowledge about the origins of the virus) could still be ahead of the rest of the world in understanding its long-term effects, despite two years of open study (but, despite this secret knowledge, not yet able to produce a sufficiently effective vaccine or treatment)?
Doubling down on a failed policy that they staked their efficiency reputation on seems like a much more likely explanation.
The reason I don’t find this explanation satisfying is that it didn’t need to be a ‘failed’ policy; the policy was very successful in suppressing/eliminating the virus during the first couple of years, while vaccines were developed, treatments improved, and uncertainty about severity reduced.
Did the Chinese government really intend to keep covid out of the country forever? At least since the emergence of Omicron it must have been clear how difficult and costly that would be.
And if ‘failure’ in that sense is inevitable, why not get ahead of the news and celebrate the success of the early response, while framing the next phase as necessary and at least partially controlled, rather than letting it look like defeat and a loss of control?
Gwern writes elsewhere in this comment section that this may be a critical and precarious year in Xi Jinping’s career. So perhaps the simplest explanation is that he is desperate to defer any appearance of failure or weakness, believing that he is vulnerable now but will soon be in a better position to ride out the consequences.
There are a lot of bad reasons to have such expectations. China’s media spend two years speaking about how COVID-19 did a lot of damage in the West but didn’t in China because of the great CCP policy.
In authoritarian countries the elite are affected by the government propaganda as well.
That’s not how things work. You don’t develop a good understanding of long-term effects by understanding the origin of the virus. Especially you don’t without a healthy scientific debate.
I expect you’re right, but can you elaborate? For the sake of discussion, suppose it was accidentally released but deliberately created. Couldn’t the ‘designers’ of such a virus have knowledge about its capacities that might elude outside researchers?
To understand the long-term impacts of a disease or drug you have to study what it does in humans. That’s why a lot of drugs that were promising to the developer of the drug don’t live up to their promises in clinical trials.
There’s information that you gain in the design of a drug that’s useful to know which questions to ask when you study the drug in humans, but clinical studies in humans are the most important source of information.
Given the pressures that exist in China to fudge numbers, any internal government statistics that the Chinese do have are likely not very trustworthy. Very smart people in the Chinese party know that.
Related theory is that they’re planning for a more dangerous disease to be released in the future, either accidentally or on purpose, and they feel the need to perfect their zero-[disease] protocol now. They can’t accept a superficial failure with covid because that means accepting a critical failure with the next thing, especially if they’re not so good at making vaccines.
Why the heck would they want to do that, considering how much COVID is clearly costing them? I don’t see any rational actor looking at the situation and being like “what we need right now to invigorate the economy is a more deadly virus”…
Practically, the Chinese government’s response to their biosafety people is: ‘You shouldn’t do that dangerous research in biosafety II labs the way you did in Wuhan. To get you to stop doing that, we give you a lot of money to build a lot of biosafety III and biosafety IV labs’.
Without openly admitting that there was a lab leak in Wuhan, they might not see other moves that are currently viable.
The problem with that policy is that the researchers in those biosafety III and biosafety IV labs are likely going to want to do
dangerousprestigious work. There are strong pressures to create research results and China does not know how to teach their researchers safety culture.It’s plausible that there are people high up in the Chinese party who do think there’s a good likelihood that there will be more screw-ups and lab leaks in the future because they don’t trust the biosafety people but who don’t see another path to take.
I can’t speak for the other commenter, but ‘planning for’ might have been intended in the sense of ‘planning to respond to’ (or at least to have been ambiguous between that and the more sinister meaning)