They have been banging away trying to get “their own” mRNA vaccine produced. They don’t have it yet.
And with the Sinowhatever vaccines: they have—according to reports—not released the data clearly, making it ridiculous that the WHO has given those vaccines their stamp of approval.
Guy
Try to put yourself in the shoes of Xi for a moment. Do you think he even gives the smallest, tiniest lab-rat’s ass about COVID or vaccines? Do you think it matters to him if a few dozen old people die of-or-with Omicron? These are the concerns of the Little People, not the movers and shakers.
The CCP have a billion people to micromanage, and that means they’ve got a billion more pressing concerns than a bad case of the sniffles. True, a crappy vaccine could conceivably cause them to lose face, which would be slightly more of a problem in Chinese culture than in the West … but not a whole lot more. Politics everywhere is about image, and image can be managed. Nobody knows that better than the CCP. The crappy performance of western vaccines was managed away mostly by repetition of the phrase “safe and effective”, and using a ginormous bucket of PR whitewash to hide the statistics from a credulous and scientifically-illiterate public. Do you think the CCP aren’t capable of doing that, dialled up to eleven?
I don’t pretend to know what they’re up to. But shutting down and terrorizing an entire Chinese-sized city - for example - isn’t generally done for trivial reasons. For the past 40 years, China has been aiming at big targets and taking audacious risks to hit them, and there’s probably something similar going on here.
This is the same party that still worships the moron that couldn’t govern and caused estimated upwards of a hundred million people to starve to death.
I do think they have big targets they want to hit but they continue to behave moronically. As much as I want to believe it’s some bigger plan, it could just be incompetence. Mao’s vision for China was a fantasy world not aligned with reality. It’s becoming clear Xi is beginning to suffer from the same delusions.
Mao couldn’t sell himself as a good statesman. He sold himself as a revolutionary and that was literally his job title for himself as it became obvious he couldn’t actually govern. I’m seeing some of that with Xi but Xi is a far better statesman.
Ughh. With the PRC’s “wolf warrior” diplomats on the loose, that’s really saying something.
Guy
It’s not impossible that they’ve simply gone collectively mad and have become obsessed with controlling COVID. You could certainly say something similar about the rest of the planet, so you might argue that China has just joined the club, in their own special way. Some of the stuff I read in the newspapers (and on forumosa) leads me to believe that some people have taken leave of their senses. Some leaders did buy into it. Michael Gunner definitely did. Joe Biden doesn’t have enough mental faculties remaining to do anything other than what he’s told by his handlers. But most didn’t; Boris and the Eton crowd laughed and partied because they knew it was all bollocks. Has Xi gone mad, and enrolled China in an updated version of “four pests”? I dunno, I’m not discounting the possibility, but at the moment it doesn’t look like that to me. They’ve come too far - they’re too close to their (declared) goal of finally humiliating the West and avenging centuries of their own humiliation - to throw it all away at the last moment.
I did wonder in the past if they knew something about COVID that the rest of the world didn’t and therefore were going to extreme measures, however I now don’t think that’s the case.
The CCP will do anything to preserve itself. China has extremely poor health care facilities in the majority of the country, doctors are not well trained for the most part and nurses even less so. The health of the population in general is not exactly high either, lung health in particular, given the high incidence of smoking and the poor air quality.
If COVID were to take widespread hold it would be a disaster of epic proportions. The population would go nuts trying to find medical resources for their families, there would not be enough manpower to put and keep lockdowns in effect, factories, police, army, utilities etc would all stop functioning as people fell ill and/or didn’t turn up due to fear of being infected. Perfect situation for a revolution to take hold! The CCP is going to do everything and anything in it’s power to make sure that doesn’t happen.
In South America:
The judge made the order as part of a complaint to suspend childhood vaccinations in Uruguay. The extent to which the authorities and Pfizer can provide the required evidence (and whether their failure to do so will have consequences) will become clear on Wednesday.
They will just pull out of the country.
A judge holding pharma companies to account? Whatever next? Ooh, look, a flock of pigs just fluttered past my window.
Contrast this with a similar complaint presented to the Metropolitan Police in the UK, which prompted the deputy commissioner to issue a curious written rebuke to the accusers, suggesting that they’re just silly billies because obviously the government can’t be anything other than pure as the driven snow.
I agree with BigDave: Pfizer will just pull out of Uruguay (and to be fair, those requirements would be impossible to meet even if the vaccines were “safe and effective”) but I’m sure they’ll take revenge in some way; I expect some bizarre misfortune to befall either the judge or the country. The method they choose may reveal something about what’s going on and who’s pushing the agenda.
And other revenge by pulling all their other medications, or increasing the prices. Or magically, a hurried expedited appeal where they win within a week or two.
Now its Macau getting its dose of PRC Lockdown. Lisboa Casino/Hotel closed up with 500 or so ‘guests’ stuck inside.
Ugh. With around 650,000 people packed into tiny Macau, and exactly one (1) public hospital to serve them, this could get ugly fast.
Wonder if they will seal off the border with Zhuhai in the PRC proper. A lot of people, I’ve heard, live there and commute to work in Macau. I imagine lots of disruptions ahead . . .
Guy
Israeli cohort study involving 196,992 unvaccinated adults found “no increase in the incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis” after COVID infection.
Chris Martenson did a video about that one.
Despite their fascist approach to vaccines, Israel has been surprisingly open with their data. They’ve been a good source of quite reliable science as a result … which is of course ignored by everyone who ought to be paying attention, and the narrative rolls forward regardless.
Nobody even mentioned myocarditis until the vaccine rollout - it was presumably so rare that it didn’t even rise much beyond the background rate, if at all. Then suddenly it became extremely important to point out that “COVID is X times more likely to result in myocarditis than vaccination”, where X is a random number. So, pretty interesting that these guys didn’t see any signal at all.
What the procedure after testing positive? At the moment I’m just staying at home.
Is everything meant to be closed again? 
I wasted money going to a restaurant. Then today the laundromat isn’t allowing seating. I wish people would get over it.
How did you waste money going to a restaurant, and what’s the correlation with the thread?
The restaurant isn’t open. This is the COVID open thread. If I posted on the Taiwan thread it would have been moved here.
But, if the restaurant isn’t open, then how did you waste money? 
Is this in the U.S.? If so, curious what city/state. thanks-
Where are you? What are you talking about? 
Guy