People hold white sheets of paper and flowers in a row as police check their IDs during a protest over coronavirus disease (COVID-19) restrictions in mainland China, during a commemoration of the victims of a fireplace in Urumqi, in Hong Kong, China November 28, 2022.
Tyrone Siu | Reuters
The White House on Monday criticized Beijing’s zero Covid strategy as ineffective and said the Chinese people have a right to peacefully protest.
“We have long said everyone has the best to peacefully protest, here in the US and around the globe. This includes within the PRC,” a spokesperson for President Joe Biden’s National Security Council said in an announcement.
Rare protests broke out against Covid lockdowns in Beijing, Shanghai, Urumqi and other cities over the weekend. Nearly three years after the virus first emerged in Wuhan, China remains to be imposing strict social controls to quash Covid outbreaks, while countries akin to the U.S. have largely returned to normal life.
“We have said that zero COVID isn’t a policy we pursuing here in the US,” the NSC spokesperson said. “And as we have said, we predict it is going to be very difficult for the People’s Republic of China to have the option to contain this virus through their zero COVID strategy.”
The U.S. Covid response is concentrated on increasing vaccination rates and making testing and treatment more accessible, the spokesperson said.
China’s stringent Covid controls have kept deaths very low in comparison with the U.S., however the measures have also deeply disrupted economic and social life. In China, greater than 30,000 people have died from Covid for the reason that pandemic began, based on the World Health Organization. Within the U.S., greater than 1 million people have died.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the highest infectious disease expert within the U.S., said China’s approach to Covid “doesn’t make public health sense.” Vaccination rates among the many elderly, one in every of the groups most vulnerable to Covid, are low in China in comparison with other countries. The vaccination campaign in China focused on people in critical positions first, those ages 18 to 59 next, and only then people ages 60 and over.
“Should you take a look at the prevalence of vaccinations among the many elderly, that it was almost counterproductive, the people you actually needed to guard weren’t getting protected,” Fauci told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. A short lived lockdown might make sense if the goal was to purchase time to spice up vaccination rates but China doesn’t appear to be doing that, he said.
“It appears that evidently in China, it was just a really, very strict extraordinary lockdown where you lock people in the home but with none seemingly endgame to it,” Fauci said.
As of August, about 86% of individuals ages 60 and older in China were fully vaccinated and 68% had received a booster, based on a September report from China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention. By comparison, 92% of older Americans were fully vaccinated and 70% had received a booster during that very same period.
Fauci said China’s domestically developed vaccines are also not very effective.
The authors of the China CDC report said older individuals are more skeptical of the vaccine. The clinical trials didn’t enroll enough older people and as a consequence there wasn’t sufficient data on the vaccine’s safety and efficacy for this age group when the immunization campaign began, they wrote.
Dr. Ashish Jha, head of the White House Covid task force, said China should give attention to ensuring the elderly get vaccinated.
“That I feel is the trail out of this virus. Lockdowns and nil COVID goes to be very difficult to sustain,” Jha told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.