The answer, say medical experts and China watchers, lies in a blend of ideology and virology.
At its heart, though, zero-COVID is still a public-health issue. And China’s dilemma over the strategy stems largely from the way the virus spreads, the tools humanity has developed to stave it off and how those tools are used.
Canada, for instance, has achieved high immunity levels through use of effective vaccines, plus infection that rose to about 60 per cent of the population during the Omicron phase, says Dr. Prabhat Jha, executive director of the Centre for Global Health Research at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital.Article content
Beijing focused its immunization efforts on working-age adults, a decision Hunter calls a “mistake.” The result is that older Chinese residents — the type who are most likely to clog hospital ICUs or die from COVID — have relatively low vaccination rates. By this March, only about half of the people over 80 had been fully immunized.Article content
China did have access to the mRNA vaccine developed by Germany’s BioNTech in partnership with Pfizer, butits use. It has instead relied mostly on products made by domestic companies Sinovac and Sinopharm which use an older technology involving inactivated — killed — versions of the virus. And which have proven less effective.
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