The never-ending COVID lockdowns in China have been heavily criticized by the media, public health officials, and western leaders for months. Some of the lockdown measures are truly draconian, like welding the doors shut to apartment buildings and throwing those who test positive in dirty, crowded quarantine centers.
But it’s just a few months ago that these same voices were singing the praises of China’s COVID policy. All through 2020 and 2021, international organizations like the WHO and the UN as well as the American government and media outlets saw the Chinese COVID response as enlightened and necessary.
Yet only a few months before the pandemic was declared, a WHO report on “Non-Pharmaceutical Public-Health Measures for Mitigating the Risk and Impact of Epidemic and Pandemic Influenza” stated that the quarantine of exposed individuals — let alone of the entire population — “is not recommended, because there is no obvious rationale for this measure.”
All pre-2020 reports were based around the same philosophy: carefully balancing the costs and benefits of all interventions according to principles of proportionality and flexibility, minimizing the disruptions to everyday social and economic life, and focusing resources on protecting those at risk.
And yet, just a few months later, western health experts and politicians enthusiastically got behind the idea of lockdowns and proceeded to elevate China’s oppressive response to the pandemic as the gold standard of how to contain an outbreak.
Part of the operation consisted in extolling the virtues of China’s Zero Covid approach—precisely what thousands of Chinese people are today rising up against. “China shows the world the right way for pandemic response,” enthused Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, the world’s most prestigious medical journal. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called China’s response “remarkable,” while former US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden noted approvingly that China “was able to crush the curve.” Former US Surgeon General Jerome Adams agreed. “We should be aiming for Zero Covid and elimination of the disease,” said Jeremy Hunt, then Britain’s health secretary (now serving as chancellor). Bill Gates concurred that at least until a vaccine was available, there was no solution but to follow the example of China.
Zero COVID was all the rage in the salons of western thinkers despite previous studies showing them to be worse than useless. That fact was confirmed in studies published in late 2021 and 2022 that showed countries like Sweden that didn’t follow the lockdown model had lower-than-average excess deaths as well as the collateral damage from lockdowns like the massive increase in global poverty, the worrying rise of teenage mental health problems, and the bullying of free people when authoritarian measures were used to stifle dissent.
And then, when people took to the streets to protest the lockdowns, the mandates, and the “vaccine passports,” they were smeared as “right-wing nuts,” “covidiots,” and “threats to public health.”
Related: Chinese Anti-COVID Lockdown Protests Have Morphed Into Anti-Regime Demonstrations
It wasn’t until the videos of the Shanghai lockdown in early 2022 began to circulate that the attitude toward China’s lockdowns began to change. Citizens screaming for help from their apartment windows, people begging for food in the streets, and the filthy conditions in the quarantine camps did much to alter the thinking of many in the west about the efficacy of China’s COVID response.
Exposing these horrors is important, but it has also fed into a new narrative that is all too convenient for all who supported lockdown and related measures in the West. The implication, after all, is that what’s happening now in China is an outlier that has little or nothing to do with the policies imposed worldwide in the past three years. Those who today denounce China’s policies after having supported them earlier insist that the latest wave of restrictions in China are incomparably worse than the first lockdown in Wuhan—and the lockdown-lite approach allegedly taken by other countries.
This simply isn’t true, and trying to argue that point shows how fast the boosters of China’s lockdown policy are backtracking. It doesn’t matter if today’s measures are “worse” than when the lockdown began in Wuhan. “The philosophy that has underpinned all the authoritarian non-pharmaceutical interventions of the past three years—in China and elsewhere—is the same. And it has proved to be an unmitigated disaster throughout the world,” writes Thomas Fazi in Compact.
With that, there is no argument.
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