November 06, 2022
The Washington Post has been a big supporter of the upward redistribution of the last four decades, openly pushing trade policy, intellectual property policy, and financial policy that give more money to those at the top. Given its general perspective, it should not be surprising that it would use an editorial criticizing China’s zero COVID-19 policy as an opportunity to push mRNA vaccines.
The editorial makes the very reasonable criticism that China’s zero COVID-19 policy has seriously disrupted the lives of hundreds of millions of people. At this point, given the widespread availability of vaccines and treatments, the public health benefits from this policy are limited.
However, it throws in the comment:
“China has also deployed its own vaccines to fight the virus, although the elderly remain undervaccinated, and the shots are not as effective as the mRNA vaccines.”
In its advice section it adds:
“China could purchase doses of mRNA vaccines and get those shots into arms. It was a good sign Friday that China agreed with Germany to allow expats on the mainland to receive the mRNA vaccine made by BioNTech, the partner of Pfizer. The deal should be broadened to include Chinese citizens.”
In fact, research has shown that the differences between the effectiveness in preventing severe illness and death, between the mRNA vaccines and China’s dead virus vaccines is trivial. China does have a real problem in that it has relatively low rates of vaccination among the elderly, the population most vulnerable to COVID-19.
It certainly seems reasonable that the country would make more of an effort to vaccinate and boost this segment of the population. They do not need the mRNA vaccines, however much the Post might like to help its billionaire friends in the pharmaceutical industry.
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