National Review Online
Thursday, April 14, 2022
In Shanghai, a city of 25 million, people are
presently subjected to a noxious superstition that
still has influential adherents around the world and especially in
public-health bureaucracies: the belief that a disease as contagious as the
Omicron variant of Covid can be controlled by the temporary, state-enforced
suspension of normal human life.
What we are witnessing in Shanghai is the
final, total failure of lockdowns as a pandemic-control measure. The daytime
images of Shanghai streets, emptied of all human life, are a vision of life on
earth after a civilization-destroying cataclysm. The nighttime
videos, featuring thousands or tens of thousands of people bellowing
out from their apartment windows and balconies, crying in desperation for human
contact, announcing their fear of running out of food, or simply crying in
futile desperation at their inability to attend to their dependent relatives,
constitute a horror movie. In some videos, state-controlled
drones admonish the people not to sing, or let a cry for freedom dwell
in their hearts.
Like Covid itself, lockdowns were a Chinese export to the
West. The British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson admitted as much. “I think
people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite
dramatically between January and March [of 2020],” he said in
an interview with the Sunday Times. “It’s a communist one party
state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought . . . and
then Italy did it. And we realized we could.” How comforting to know that
leaders in public health think of our civil liberties as something they can
“get away with” suspending. Following Ferguson’s intuition and advice, the
United Kingdom threw out its existing plans to control a respiratory pandemic
by focusing on the vulnerable and preserving liberty for the greatest number,
and embraced Chinese-style shut-ins. Most other countries followed their own
versions, fearing only that they would do too little. Our screams didn’t blend
into a giant chorus, but in millions of homes, frustration with lockdown unmoored
people.
That Covid tended to spread most efficiently in
households among those deficient in vitamin D troubled policy-makers too
little.
Shanghai’s lockdown is an act of brutality, particularly
with the threat of starvation looming over citizens who cannot resupply
themselves with food. But the damage won’t be contained to China. Shanghai is
the country’s top manufacturing city. Supply chains will continue to feel
disruption from this particular lockdown for months, perhaps years, to come
with knock-on effects in inflation.
Over two years, we’ve seen that Covid’s ebbs and flows
are seasonal, and not particularly responsive to state-ordered mask mandates or
curfews. Our best defense turned out to be cutting-edge medical innovation and
the cutting of red tape. Operation Warp Speed brought effective-enough vaccines
to the public in the U.S. in record time. Broad public uptake has allowed the
United States, almost everywhere, to escape the pandemic and its restrictions.
China failed to sufficiently vaccinate even its elderly
population ahead of the Omicron spread. And so it has resorted again to a
medieval approach to disease management, but backed by an omnipresent
security apparatus that functions like the Eye of Sauron.
Let this travesty be the final blow to China’s reputation
of having an effective governmental response to Covid. China prevaricated with
international health organizations to save its reputation early on, downplaying
the severity and nature of the disease, arresting the reporters revealing it to
the world, and slowing the global response to it. China has lied ever since
about the death toll of the disease, falsely bolstering the reputation of
Covid-Zero. China failed to provide basic cooperation with global authorities
to a degree that even the World Health Organization’s leader, Dr. Tedros
Adhanom Ghebreyesus, refused to rule out the Wuhan lab as the source of the
pandemic. And China’s lies have now led to the prolonged house arrest of
millions in its territory.
If there were any doubt, this latest episode should send
an unmistakable message: The Chinese model is a failure.
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