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china’s policy of dynamic zero covid works..........

New economic data shows that China’s policy of “Dynamic Zero Covid,” or maintaining the lockdowns-and-testing regimen long abandoned in the West as a tool for controlling COVID-19 outbreaks, was not the economic drag Western experts predicted it would be.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics said on Monday that the country’s gross domestic product increased by 3.9% in the third quarter of 2022 as compared to the previous year, China Daily reported. Moreover, in the first three quarters of 2022, China’s GDP grew by 3%.

 

 

Both are strong increases from China's second quarter numbers, which showed just 0.4% GDP growth over the previous year and a 2.5% increase for the first half of the year overall. Still, that is substantially lower than Beijing’s revised economic target of 5.5% growth for the year.

 

The news comes as the Communist Party of China wraps up its 20th Party Congress, in which Chinese President Xi Jinping was confirmed for a third five-year term in office. Many observers also expected the congress to serve as a bellwether for the future of Dynamic Zero Covid, which Beijing has maintained since the summer of 2021, when the Delta variant arrived in the country.

 

 

Instead, Xi hailed the “all out people’s war to stop the spread of the virus,” telling delegates that his administration had done everything it could to protect people’s health and put “the people and their lives above all else.”

 

Dynamic Zero Covid involves several practices that were established as successful COVID-19 control measures early in the pandemic, but which have long since been abandoned by Western nations. Social lockdowns, mass testing of entire urban populations, and funneling of food, medicine and other necessities to people in quarantine have succeeded at taming even the ultra-infectious Omicron variant of the virus.

On Sunday, China’s National Health Commission detected a total of 1,076 cases and no new deaths. It has recorded roughly 600 COVID-19 deaths in all of 2022, which is how many are dying of the virus in less than two days in the United States, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

However, according to numerous Western experts, this combination of suppressing COVID-19 and maintaining economic growth was not possible.

As early as January, shortly after the Omicron variant arrived in China and prompted lockdowns in several Chinese cities, the Wall Street Journal asked if Zero Covid was “starting to backfire.”

By April, British historian Niall Ferguson wrote in Bloomberg that Xi had “oversold” Zero Covid and it had become his “nemesis,” and that the virus had returned to exact “revenge on its country of origin,” floating the widely dismissed conspiracy theory that COVID-19 escaped from a Wuhan biolab in late 2019.

 

 

“The underlying reality is that, for social as well as economic reasons, Zero Covid will need to be quietly abandoned,” Ferguson argued. He then made a very explicit prediction: “Morgan Stanley’s base case is that China will not exit from Zero Covid until after the close of the 20th Party Congress in the fall. In practice, that may no longer be viable.”

 

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propaganda.....

 

A REUTERS INVESTIGATION

Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic

 

The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.

By CHRIS BING and JOEL SCHECTMAN

 

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.

 

“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”

After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.

The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review, Reuters found.

“I don’t think it’s defensible. I’m extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that.”

Daniel Lucey, infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine.

The U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda, and Reuters found no evidence the Pentagon’s influence operation did so.

Spokespeople for Trump and Biden did not respond to requests for comment about the clandestine program.

A senior Defense Department official acknowledged the U.S. military engaged in secret propaganda to disparage China’s vaccine in the developing world, but the official declined to provide details.

A Pentagon spokeswoman said the U.S. military “uses a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the U.S., allies, and partners.” She also noted that China had started a “disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19.”

In an email, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it has long maintained the U.S. government manipulates social media and spreads misinformation.

Manila’s embassy in Washington did not respond to Reuters inquiries, including whether it had been aware of the Pentagon operation. A spokesperson for the Philippines Department of Health, however, said the “findings by Reuters deserve to be investigated and heard by the appropriate authorities of the involved countries.” Some aid workers in the Philippines, when told of the U.S. military propaganda effort by Reuters, expressed outrage.

Briefed on the Pentagon’s secret anti-vax campaign by Reuters, some American public health experts also condemned the program, saying it put civilians in jeopardy for potential geopolitical gain. An operation meant to win hearts and minds endangered lives, they said.

“I don’t think it’s defensible,” said Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. “I’m extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that,” said Lucey, a former military physician who assisted in the response to the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The effort to stoke fear about Chinese inoculations risked undermining overall public trust in government health initiatives, including U.S.-made vaccines that became available later, Lucey and others said. Although the Chinese vaccines were found to be less effective than the American-led shots by Pfizer and Moderna, all were approved by the World Health Organization. Sinovac did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/

 

 

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