Allysia Finley
WSJ, Dec. 11, 2022
“… by Dr. Fauci’s account, Dr. Lane concluded that “the Chinese had a very organized way of trying to contain the spread in Wuhan and elsewhere,” even though he never visited Wuhan.”
China’s zero-Covid policies have recently come under criticism from public-health leaders—including those at the World Health Organization—who once held them up as a model for the West.
“China’s success rests largely with a strong administrative system that it can mobilise in times of threat, combined with the ready agreement of the Chinese people to obey stringent public health procedures,” the Lancet editorialized on March 7, 2020. Western countries, it added, “must abandon their fears of the negative short-term public and economic consequences that may follow from restricting public freedoms as part of more assertive infection control measures.”
That hasn’t worn well. The negative social and economic consequences of lockdowns in the West—from learning losses and destroyed small businesses to alcoholism and drug abuse—weren’t “short-term.” Nor were China’s draconian zero-Covid policies, which three years later are only slowly being eased.
As hospitals in New York filled up, public-health experts fawned at China’s putative command-and-control of Covid. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and one the media’s top-cited public-health scolds, tweeted on March 27, 2020, that “China w/ 4 times the population of the US was able to flatten their curve.” He added: “Our (US) lack of learning from a region that was hit months before us is striking.”
Dr. Topol still insists that China’s repressive policies “worked well until containment of Omicron became impossible,” though most people now acknowledge that they were socially and economically unsustainable. Many, however, still won’t admit it was a mistake for Western democracies to follow China’s strategy. Why did they believe it was a good idea?
A charitable explanation is that China’s Communist Party bamboozled Western public-health officials by projecting competence and control. The National Institutes of Health sent deputy director Clifford Lane to China in February 2020 on a World Health Organization mission to assess the situation on the ground. “The Chinese were managing this in a very structured, organized way,” he explained in an April 2020 NIH newsletter.
“Dr. Lane was very impressed about how, from a clinical public health standpoint, the Chinese were handling the isolation, the contact tracing, the building of facilities to take care of people, and that’s what I believed he meant when he said [they] were managing this in a very structured, organized way,” Anthony Fauci stated during a deposition last month. …source