President Xi Jinping says he is concerned about the spike in the country, where health services are unprepared to handle the peak of infections and hospital admissions. Moderna and contacts with the government for mRna vaccines
Xi Jinping appeared at a Chinese provincial hospital engaged in the fight to save Covid patients. Not in person, but via video link from the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The communist general secretary admitted the difficulties, the stress of prevention and control: he could not have denied the critical situation of the moment, having spoken to doctors and nurses who have been on the front lines for more than a month. But immediately, the light of dawn before us ensured victory Tenacity.
Following the usual slogans, Xi explained what the main alarm of this new phase is (as the authorities define it so as not to have to talk about a health and humanitarian crisis): I am particularly worried about the rural areas, because of their relatively weak medical Supply facilities I worry about our farmers and the elderly. Words of common sense. For days, Beijing’s epidemiologists have been observing that after the first wave of infections has passed through the big cities, the front is shifting to the countryside, where health care is less well equipped.
Train stations, long-distance bus terminals and airports are packed these days: the great exodus from the cities to the countryside is underway for the Lunar New Year celebrations, which fall on Sunday, January 22nd.
Millions of Chinese workers are returning to rural villages and towns, where they are met by elderly relatives and families who have been waiting for three years to embrace them: a classic super-spreader event, accelerating the spread of the virus could. Xi ordered the domestic pharmaceutical industry to increase production of medicines and equipment. State television showed images of health teams going door-to-door in villages to vaccinate the elderly.
The back administration campaign, victims of the Covid zero policy that only used lockdowns and quarantines to curb infections. And Chinese-made vaccines that use an inactivated virus are also lagging behind in their effectiveness.
It has now been discovered that those developed in the West using messenger RNA from Moderna and Pfizer offer longer range.
Beijing has rejected offers of foreign vaccines for reasons of national prestige: after a visit to Beijing by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the delivery of a few thousand doses of Pfizer BioNTech, reserved for the community of German residents, about seven thousand people, was accepted.
Now Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel says there are contacts with Beijing to supply the American pharmaceutical company’s vaccine. I want to understand how we can help the Chinese government and what their health needs are, Mr Bancel told Portal from Davos. It seems just the beginning of a discussion at the moment.
Chinese industry has also been commissioned by the government to work on a new mRNA vaccine. But even if a miraculous pharmaceutical cooperation agreement were found with Beijing at this point, the supplies and the administration of the doses would in any case arrive in the Chinese countryside long after the wave of infections predicted by Xi and his advisers.
The latest forecast from Airfinity, a UK-based institute for epidemiological analysis, claims that the peak of deaths immediately following the major movements in the area will rise to 36,000 a day for the Lunar New Year holiday. Airfinity and numerous other epidemiological research institutes (including one based in Hong Kong) argue that the death toll in China since December cannot have been less than 600,000: ten times the number of deaths recorded by the government. Last week, the National Health Commission said 59,938 people died in hospitals from COVID-19 between December 8 and January 12. The data does not include those who died at home and it is likely that in rural areas where hospitals are hard to reach most deaths will not be recorded as caused by Covid-19.
Then there are doctors who say they have been encouraged not to state Covid on death certificates.
hp China’s cyberspace regulator (which monitors and censors China’s internet) has vowed to extinguish the somber emotions caused by pandemic rumors during the Lunar New Year holiday. The rework campaign is intensified. Covid Zero did not eliminate the infections; Censorship tries to defeat the virus of controversy.
January 19, 2023 (change January 19, 2023 | 2:47 p.m.)
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