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The new approach is called “Dynamic Clearing”. This is the buzzword China’s state pandemic managers are using to describe their strategy to contain regional outbreaks of the coronavirus. What translates in Spanish as “dynamic elimination” could, according to Chinese observers, herald a possible change in Beijing’s policy on coronavirus, focused until now on the “zero COVID” strategy.
Leaders in Beijing know that a failure to manage the pandemic threatens to spark social and economic unrest, not just in China but around the world. The disruption of supply chains would become a permanent situation in China due to new lockdowns and the fall in domestic consumption would cause the economic growth of the People’s Republic to be even lower. A horror scenario for many business partners.
Xi’an Example
Chinese leaders began to sense just how tense the situation could become when angry residents of the central Chinese metropolis of Xian denounced the authorities’ harsh lockdown measures on social media.
There were bottlenecks in the food supply for people in home quarantine, who were not even allowed to leave their apartments to go shopping. There were also allegations that even pregnant women had been turned away from Xian hospitals and suffered miscarriages as a result.
Low efficacy of Chinese omicron vaccines
Meanwhile, China is also discussing the fact that the vaccines developed in the country are not very effective against the omicron variant. Even Gao Fu, head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, admits: “Our vaccines work against omicron, but their effectiveness is very limited.”
The Chinese are thus faced with a dilemma. Due to the “zero COVID” policy, only very few Chinese have been infected with the coronavirus. Thus, most of the 1.4 billion citizens have virtually no immunity against the omicron variant.
The verdict of the analysts of the Eurasia Group, a think tank The New Yorker who advises Wall Street and lists the top ten risks to the global economy each January is therefore unequivocal: “Two years after the virus began to spread in China, the pandemic continues to wreak havoc…. and what has been the most successful policy in fighting the virus has become the least successful.”
Waiting for the Chinese mRNA vaccine
This also blows up like a soap bubble the leaders’ narrative around Xi Jinping that China’s handling of the pandemic is superior to that of the West. To have to admit now that the only way to deal with the omicron variant is with the help of BioNTech or Moderna mRNA vaccines would be a serious discredit to the Chinese leadership and, by Asian standards, an ultimate punishment.
Eurasia Group experts believe that the abandonment of the “zero COVID” policy, which Head of State Xi Jinping in particular has repeatedly cited as a shining example of China’s superiority in dealing with the pandemic, only it will come when proprietary mRNA vaccines developed in China are approved and available. “Then China will be able to change course”
However, Thomas Hale, a political scientist at the University of Oxford, warns that a change of course would not be so easy to communicate to the Chinese population: “When the time comes, the transition (to another strategy) may not be easy, because the Chinese society has become accustomed to low levels of infection.
However, no one knows when the mRNA vaccine developed by the companies Walvax Biotechnology and Suzhou Abogen Biosciences will be approved. The booster for Chinese who have been immunized with the Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines has so far only been tested in mice.
Reality beats strategy
Singapore, New Zealand and Australia have already abandoned their previous “zero COVID” policy months ago. How will China decide? Until now, the government-controlled media has reported that the omicron variant was introduced mainly by travelers from abroad and even by mail, for example from Canada. But, meanwhile, cases are also becoming known that increasingly question this theory.
Depending on the strength of the next omicron outbreaks in China will determine what happens next. After the Olympics, at the latest, it will be seen whether people continue to believe that China can shield itself against omicron.
(gg/ms)
Author: Thomas Kohlman