The Chinese Foreign Ministry reacted on Wednesday (11) to comments by the director-general of the WHO (World Health Organization), Tedros Adhanom, who called the Covid zero policy adopted by Beijing unsustainable. The chancellery described the speeches as irresponsible and asked the Ethiopian to review his stance.
During a press conference in Geneva on Tuesday (10), Adhanom criticized the Chinese policy of completely eliminating living with the coronavirus, arguing that the strategy goes against the current characteristics of the evolution of the microorganism. The statements were supported by other experts from the organization.
Epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical leader for Covid-related issues, said that the current global objective is not to detect all cases, nor to completely prevent the transmission of the virus – as the Chinese regime has tried to do. “What we have to do is reduce the transmission rate, because the virus is circulating at a very high level of intensity,” she concluded.
Chinese diplomacy spokesman Zhao Lijian was asked about the remarks during a press conference. After defending the Chinese model, which he said had bequeathed the country one of the most successful virus control results in the world, he said that the “dynamic zero Covid policy is not aimed at ending infections, but at controlling the virus with minimal social cost.” and in the shortest possible time”.
Shortly afterwards, when questioned more emphatically by another reporter, he stated, “We hope the authorities will look at China’s Covid policy objectively and rationally, learn more about the facts and avoid making irresponsible comments.”
The criticisms made by the WHO were also censored on Chinese social networks, so that Adhanom’s statements were not oxygenated in the domestic environment. On the Weibo platform, similar to Twitter, the hashtags “Tedros” and “WHO” did not show results. On WeChat, it was not possible to share an article published on the official United Nations platform with the director’s criticism.
“This shows that Beijing has zero tolerance for anyone challenging the Covid zero policy,” media researcher Fang Kecheng of the Chinese University of Hong Kong told Reuters news agency. “This issue has been thoroughly politicized, and any dissenting opinion would be considered a challenge to leadership.”
The model adopted by the Chinese communist regime had as one of the most recent developments the confinement of Shanghai, a financial hub of 26 million inhabitants, which enters the sixth week of a comprehensive lockdown, during which demonstrations against the zero Covid policy, such as reports of food shortages and violation of privacy were recorded.
The city reported no new symptomatic cases outside areas with the strictest restrictions on Tuesday for the first time since the beginning of the month, according to official figures. Authorities, however, say the time has not yet come to relax restrictions. “The risk of a new spike remains,” said Zhao Dandan, deputy director of the Shanghai health commission.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, China has accumulated 1.1 million confirmed cases of the disease and 5,200 deaths from Covid. More than 86% of the population completed the first vaccination course, but only half of Chinese people over 80 years of age did so.
A study by Chinese and American scientists published on Tuesday showed that if Beijing abandons its harsh “Covid zero” policy without taking extra measures – such as expanding vaccination and access to treatments – it could put the lives of more than 1.5 million people. at risk
The matter was also addressed by the chancellery’s spokesman, who used it as an argument to defend the strategy. “The dynamic Covid zero policy offered effective protection to the elderly and the most vulnerable groups; it is absolutely different from herd immunity or natural immunity approaches adopted by other countries.”
