China might chill out its ‘zero covid’ policy amid widespread protests

Three years of stringent covid policies have put the Chinese government in a bind

China offered the clearest sign to date that it might end its hardline pursuit of “zero covid” within the wake of the country’s most historic outpouring of protests in many years, The Post’s Lyric Li reports this morning.

Some major cities have begun loosening measures, reminiscent of relaxing some mass testing and allowing close contacts of infected people to quarantine at home.

At a gathering of health officials, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, who heads covid response efforts, said the country faces a “recent reality” with the less deadly omicron variant and a rise in vaccine coverage and health-care preparedness, Lyric writes, citing state media. It was a rare instance of a senior Chinese official — who has been linked to a few of the harshest elements of the “zero covid” policy — publicly acknowledging the virus’ risks are less severe than earlier on within the pandemic. 

The times of demonstrations had brought global scrutiny to China’s stringent covid measures — and Communist Party leaders are warning that they are going to “resolutely crack down” on the protests. 

The country is grappling with its worst coronavirus outbreak for the reason that pandemic began, which comes because the Communist Party said in October that it could seek to scale back the burden of the virus on each day life, though without offering a concrete road map on the best way to achieve this. For nearly three years, China has been aiming to completely stamp out the virus, at the same time as many of the world learns to live with it. 

The dynamic raises questions on what easing out of the “zero covid” policy could appear like — and the way long it could take — if officials ultimately resolve to achieve this. 

The weekend’s protests were triggered by an apartment complex fire that killed 10 people in Urumqi. Residents accused firefighters of being too slow to reply and faulted coronavirus restrictions. The town government denies there was a delay. 

That sparked the biggest showing of discontent within the country for the reason that 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. 1000’s took to the streets in over a dozen cities. They called for the top to pandemic restrictions, with some going so far as demanding President Xi Jinping resign, “a sentiment deemed so sensitive in China that it’s seldom uttered publicly,” writes The Post’s Christian Shepherd.

Demonstrations largely fizzled out with the cold temperatures and starting of the workweek, though a video making the rounds on social media Wednesday showed protesters throwing what seemed to be glass bottles at security officers within the southern city Guangzhou. 

Chinese authorities are responding by quietly attempting to quell protests through tactics like showing up at homes in the course of the night, stopping residents and searching their phones for restricted apps, and holding people at police stations for greater than 24 hours, our colleagues Lily Kuo, Pei-Lin Wu and Theodora Yu reported yesterday. Officials are also expected to impose tighter censorship measures and issue propaganda in an effort to forestall escalating public backlash. 

There are signs this week of easing some covid-19 restrictions.

Beijing, Chongqing and Guangzhou will now allow some close contacts of individuals infected with covid-19 to quarantine at home (it’s unclear if this policy will spread across the country). Meanwhile, in Chengdu, the development of a facility that might quarantine greater than 10,000 people was called off. And in Urumqi, public transportation partially restarted Monday.

However the move raises serious questions, considering how long the country has been under the tight restrictions. 

Vaccine uptake has been low in China. Roughly two-thirds of Chinese residents over age 80 have received two vaccine doses, and only 40 percent of that age group have been boosted. The National Health Commission is encouraging local governments to discover elderly individuals who haven’t gotten shots and in the event that they refuse, obtain a reason.

There are also questions over whether China’s health-care system can handle a sudden and stark reversal within the “zero covid” policy. Along with the low booster rate among the many elderly, the country’s population has low natural immunity, which suggests cases of severe illness could spike and potentially overwhelm the system.

• “For China, estimated coronavirus cases are chilling, based on the Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korean experiences of opening up after tight restrictions,” Jeremy Wallace, an associate professor of presidency at Cornell University, wrote yesterday in The Post. “Some estimates project well over 1 million covid deaths inside a number of months if China completely removed restrictions — and China’s health system is far more threadbare than those of their East Asian neighbors.”

FDA appears poised to ease blood donation restrictions for gay and bisexual men

The Food and Drug Administration is considering shifting away from a blanket ban on blood donations from sexually lively gay and bisexual men in favor of a more individualized approach, the Wall Street Journal reports. 

The change could be a serious win for advocates who’ve long argued that the policy, which originated within the Nineteen Eighties through the AIDS epidemic, is discriminatory and lacks scientific justification. 

Federal rules prohibit all men who’ve had sex with men in the past three months from donating blood. Previously, men who had sex with men were banned from donating blood altogether, a prohibition that was lifted in 2015.

Under the potential recent policy, which remains to be under debate and is predicted to be released in the approaching months, all potential donors could be required to finish a questionnaire about their recent sexual intercourse. Individuals who say they haven’t had any recent sexual partners within the last three months would likely be permitted to donate. 

Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.), who advocated for the prohibition to be lifted:

CDC expands wastewater testing for polio to Michigan, Pennsylvania

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will begin testing wastewater to detect polio within the Philadelphia and Detroit area in an effort to focus on communities at highest risk for the life-threatening illness, our colleague Lena H. Sun reports.

The testing will last for no less than 4 months and occur in places with low vaccination rates. The Michigan and Philadelphia health departments are working with the CDC to discover undervaccinated communities that even have wastewater sampling locations. 

The expansion comes amid growing pressure to bolster strategies to fight the disease after the primary U.S. polio case in nearly a decade was discovered this summer in Rockland County, N.Y. The virus has since been detected in wastewater samples from nearby areas. 

Other news from across the agencies …

The Biden administration is eyeing winding down the general public health emergency for mpox, the virus called monkeypox until it was renamed this week, Politico’s Adam Cancryn reports. Officials may issue a notice later this week that the declaration will end in 60 days.

The FDA paused the emergency use authorization of Eli Lilly’s coronavirus drug bebtelovimab since it isn’t more likely to be effective at neutralizing dominant omicron subvariants BQ.1 and BQ.1.1. The drug was the one remaining monoclonal antibody treatment cleared to be used, in response to Stat. 

Deaths related to alcohol consumption and drug use increased amongst older adults in america in the primary yr of the pandemic, with drug overdose deaths greater than tripling in people age 65 and over through the past 20 years, in response to data published yesterday by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.

California courts to weigh free speech and medical misinformation

Two lawsuits in California have preemptively challenged a first-of-its-kind law that may punish doctors for spreading misinformation about covid-19, the Latest York Times reports. 

The legal challenges test what steps, if any, states can take to treatment an issue that has divided the country.

At issue is a law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) in September that empowers the Medical Board of California to designate the spread of false or misleading information concerning the coronavirus to patients as “unprofessional conduct.” Punishments range from fines to the suspension or revocation of a physician’s license to practice within the state. The law is about to take effect Jan. 1. 

The view from supporters: Proponents of the measure argue it’s essential to safeguard patients against doctors who fueled skepticism about vaccines and mask mandates or encouraged the use of medication like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, neither of which have been proven to be effective against the coronavirus, the Latest York Times’s Steven Lee Myers writes. 

The view from opponents: Plaintiffs within the case view the law as an unconstitutional infringement of free speech that’s each vague and intrusive. Doctors involved within the legal challenges, a few of whom have spoken out against the federal government and its pandemic recommendations, warn that the measure could stifle a physician’s ability to truthfully advise their patients concerning the risks and advantages of coronavirus treatments and prevention methods.

ACLU of Northern California:

• ProPublica and Vanity Fair are defending their story published last month about an interim report on the origins of covid-19 that concluded that the pandemic was “more likely than not, the results of a research-related incident,” following an internal review of the story after it received sharp criticism over its translations.
• Indiana’s Republican attorney general asked the state’s medical board to discipline a health care provider who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio over allegations that she failed to instantly report the kid abuse to authorities.
• Swiss drugmaker Roche will mostly end testing of its experimental Alzheimer’s drug gantenerumab after it didn’t slow the progression of the memory-robbing disease in a pair of late-stage clinical trials, Reuters reports.

Poison pill: How fentanyl killed a 17-year-old (By Devlin Barrett | The Washington Post)

Yale accused of discriminating against students with mental illness (By William Wan | The Washington Post)

Latest York’s Plan to Address Crisis of Mentally Ailing Faces High Hurdles (By Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Andy Newman | The Latest York Times)

Thanks for reading! See y’all tomorrow.