cmarshall

China's GDP did grow 7.9% in the second quarter, nevertheless.

I like reading Haseltine's opinions, in this case quoting SAGE, because he's a contrarian to the general opinion on virus matters. However, early on he regarded an eventual Covid vaccine as unlikely for several good reasons, but he was wrong on that one.

It's not necessarily the case that Covid will evolve toward lower mortality. There would be environmental pressure to do so if wild Covid had high mortality since in that case lower mortality would prolong the transmission career of the virus. That effect would be enhanced if wild Covid had low transmission rates, like HIV, for example. However, the fact is wild Covid was just the opposite: high transmission rates and relatively low mortality, much lower than SARS, for example. So, most people infected with Covid don't die and spread it to a lot of other people during their two weeks or so of illness before they recover. Lowering the already low mortality rate in a variant is unlikely to provide a significant competitive advantage over other similar strains. The ancient epidemic diseases that evolved into relatively harmless childhood diseases, like mumps and measles, probably took centuries to do so and that was in the absence of any effective treatment.

Here's an opinion from that well-known Communist source, Forbes Magazine, written by former Harvard Medical School professor, William Haseltine, PhD, about the success of China's anti-Covid policies. The article dates from January, 2021 when the Covid death toll in America was only 400,000. I decry the stubborn resistance of most governments and people to acknowledge and to learn from China’s success. For most, their resistance is led by ignorance. China’s successes are not widely known and rarely covered by the US and international media. For others who are more well informed, it is willful disregard of an important public health achievement that we should all be learning from. When this negligence comes from our government representatives, it borders on dereliction of their public health duty. Yes, I do believe China's numbers, in part because of personal experience and the stories from my colleagues in China who describe their Covid-free daily lives. And no, China’s success in containing Covid-19 is not the consequence of totalitarianism. It is the consequence of a government that has learned to protect its people from pandemic tragedies. China is following a rulebook they first learned in large part at the Harvard School of Public Health following SARS. That China applied these lessons while we did not is a lasting embarrassment and tragedy for the nearly 400,000 lives lost, the one million-plus of our citizens who are scarred for life from their encounter with Covid-19, and for so many of us who have mourned the loss of family members and friends. https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/01/14/why-america-should-look-to-china-to-contain-covid-19/

Yes, that's right. As of 7/26/2021 Sinopharm has not received temporary authorization in Brazil and has no study results.

The Hungarian study reported not a measure of effectiveness against contracting Covid or dying from it, but only levels of antibodies. It found that 25% of older recipients of Sinopharm did not have the required minimum level of antibodies. Antibody production typically declines over time with vaccines, but I was unable to find comparable data for other Covid vaccines. Protection against infection or serious disease involves more than antibodies, such as B cells, which produce antibodies, and T cells. Estimates of Sinopharm's effectiveness against infection in other studies range from 50% (Brazil) to 86% (Abu Dhabi.)

Another vacuous claim with no evidence.

This is an issue that has been well understood for a long time. The WHO has said from the beginning of Covid that a lockdown results from a failure to apply the standard public health response to an epidemic disease early and thoroughly enough. That happened in Wuhan/Hubei early in 2020. The spread overwhelmed their contact tracing capability. So, they locked down first Wuhan and then all of Hubei Province. After 77 days the incidence of transmission had to reduced to the point that it could be within their contact tracing capability. Thereafter, they never had to do widescale lockdowns again, only local ones. This is 100% the best practice. The Australians did the same in Melbourne and then all of Victoria.

I have presented evidence. You have not.

Yes, Mao was a mass murderer, but that was in the 50's. Since Pol Pot in 1975 it looks to me like only the US has achieved the atrocity level of a million innocent people dead.

Yes, the vaccines are effective, but effective vaccines have also come from China and Russia. Even if the vaccines do stop the epidemic in the US, 900,000 (not 618,000) people died entirely due to the failure of the government. China, S. Korea, Viet Nam, Taiwan, and other countries did not just let people die while waiting for a vaccine as the US, Brazil, Sweden, and the UK did.

Estimates range from 150,000 to one million. I take the high end The October 2006 Lancet study by Gilbert Burnham (of Johns Hopkins University) and co-authors[32][33] estimated total excess deaths (civilian and non-civilian) related to the war of 654,965 excess deaths up to July 2006. The 2006 study was based on surveys conducted between May 20 and July 10, 2006. More households were surveyed than during the 2004 study, allowing for a 95% confidence interval of 392,979 to 942,636 excess Iraqi deaths. Those estimates were far higher than other available tallies at the time.[168] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Various_estimates What is not a matter of dispute is that there were no WMD and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So, every death was of a person innocent of the American accusations used to justify the war.

What is false?

So, the USA's record stands then as far as we know.

Do you have data to support that claim?

Here is a press release from the Yale School of Public Health dated January 23, 2020: Q: How has rapid data sharing, including sharing of the nCOV2019 virus’ genomes, helped advance the investigation into the nCOV2019 outbreak? Two weeks ago, we didn't even know what the nCOV2019 virus was. Today, thanks to China’s quick public release of the initial nCOV2019 virus genome, there are now 18 genomes connected to nCOV2019 that are being shared and studied by scientists around the world. By rapidly sharing this data, scientists were able to quickly identify nCOV2019 as a novel coronavirus related to those previously found in bats. https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/rapid-data-sharing-and-genomics-vital-to-china-virus-response/ The subsequent failure of the Western countries to protect themselves against the coming spread was not due to information blocking in China, but to their own incompetence which is proven by the ability of other governments to control it, such as S. Korea, Viet Nam, Taiwan, etc.

That is a vacuous statement. Quick quiz: what is the only country since Pol Pot's Cambodia to kill upwards of one million people, every single one of whom has since been shown to be entirely innocent of the accusations used to justify their murder, i.e. involvement in 9/11 and Weapons of Mass Destruction? Hint: it wasn't China. If you think that question has nothing to do with your opinion of China, then you have Orwell to thank.

What "Orwellian" measures did the Chinese government use that were not justified by the need to stop the spread of the virus? They locked down first Wuhan and then all of Hubei Province when the virus was out of control. Restrictions on households during the lockdown were severe: only one member of the household could go out every other day only for a couple of hours to get food for the family. The recent lockdown in Melbourne was similar however. Residents could only go out for a limited time per day for exercise and couldn't go more than five kilometers. Sounds similar to me. In China those who tested positive were sometimes forcibly isolated which was completely necessary. And it worked. After the Wuhan lockdown ended seventy-seven days later, China never had to lock down another city, because their other public health measures were effective. The historical gold standard of epidemic control to my mind is Milan during the Black Death. Plague killed off half of Europe in 1348, but the die off was not uniform. Milan was spared, although not miraculously. What happened was the first two families that were infected were bricked up in their homes by the authorities. This example should be taught in schools as the perfect response. Similarly, the Chinese measures saved millions of lives.

This is a concern I have wondered about for a long time with respect to Aids. Since there is no vaccine for HIV, but only treatments that keeps the infected person alive without eliminating the infection and since the anti-viral cocktail used is extremely expensive so that it can never be used widely in poor areas like Africa, for instance, then that means that the HIV virus will never mutate into non-lethality (like the mumps and measles viruses have in the past) and that the first world will therefore constantly be re-infecting the poor areas of the world with updated variants of the HIV virus. Probably the evolution to non-lethality takes centuries rather than years, so it may be a question of only theoretical interest. Nevertheless, to the extent that the availability of effective Aids treatment in the rich countries that does not cure would tend to exacerbate the Aids pandemic in poor regions. It does seem that Covid vaccines might raise the same question, although it has yet to be established how great the risk of transmission is in breakthrough infections.

New cases represent not the disease burden, but the risk burden.

Herd immunity may not be achievable. In Michigan 50% of the deer are infected with Covid. Probably other wild mammal species are also. We're not going to vaccinate the deer. So, humans will now be in constant contact with an animal reservoir. So, goodbye herd immunity.

Mars.

From the point of view of New York, Canada is Kansas.

You're not in Kansas anymore.

Every economy in the world that is growing in 2021 is doing so by comparison with the low base of the Covid recession in 2020, very much including the US. Yes, it's true that the current inflation in the US, for example, is due to supply chain disruption not something that is likely to cause persistent inflation, such as a wage-price spiral. The writer neither identifes a cause for the wholesale inflation that he reports, nor suggests why the current inflation should lead to any slowdown in the economy no matter what its cause. The FT writer seems to be looking for any reason to sniff out Chinese failure either in managing Covid or the economy and yet never gives any actual reason to be pessimistic about either. In the end he quotes Goldman, Sachs's prediction that in any case the upswing the economy will resume by the end of the year. So, what is the point of the article other than to suggest failure where there isn't any evidence to support it? 94 or 144 cases is completely insignificant no matter how many provinces it is spread across.