China’s financial hub of Shanghai began a two-phase lockdown on Monday, amid a surge in COVID-19 cases.
Shanghai, one of China’s largest cities with 26 million people, had never implemented a full-scale citywide lockdown since the Chinese regime launched its zero-COVID playbook at the onset of the pandemic in early 2020.
But the current outbreak driven by the highly infectious Omicron variant of the virus appears to have put pressure on local officials to follow other Chinese cities, such as Changchun and Shenzhen, which in recent weeks have gone into lockdown, in imposing strict restrictions.
All residents east of the Huangpu River, which divides Shanghai, are being sealed in their homes from March 28 to April 1 to allow health workers to complete at least two rounds of mass testing, Shanghai authorities said in a notice released on March 27.
The lockdown and mass screenings will move to people living west of the river on April 1, and last until April 5, according to the notice.
During the lockdown, people aren’t allowed to leave their residential compounds, and public transportation will be suspended. Businesses and firms that aren’t considered essential have been ordered to shut.
Many communities within Shanghai already have been locked down for the past week, with their housing compounds blocked off with blue and yellow plastic barriers and residents required to submit to multiple tests for COVID-19.
However, Shanghai officials repeatedly had denied that the entire city would be locked down.
By July, 98 percent of British adults had coronavirus antibodies, mostly through vaccination. Yet 35,000 Britons since then have died of COVID. Nearly all were jabbed. Now cases are soaring again.
It is time to face reality.
If Britain is the future of the coronavirus in highly mRNA vaccinated countries, the future is bleak.
Britain authorized Pfizer’s mRNA Covid vaccine even before the United States. It vaccinated against Covid faster than any other advanced country except Israel.
The results have been worse than unpromising.
Last week, Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, warned the coronavirus would remain a public health threat “for the rest of our lives.” This assessmentis far grimmer than any that American officials have made, at least publicly. But Britain is now facing yet another wave of Covid infections and deaths – its fourth, or fifth, or sixth, depending on who’s counting.
Dismissing Whitty as a fearmonger would be easy. In much of 2020 and 2021, he pushed lockdowns and offered regular predictions of doom.
But even a stopped hysteric can be right twice a day. And Whitty’s assessment is actually much darker than one he made in mid-December – when he predicted that “each six months [going forward] will be better than the last six months.”
This graph of the last year of Covid deaths in Britain explains why Whitty is no longer optimistic:
Even when new variants roll out, deaths no longer fall close to zero, as they did in 2020, before the mRNA shots were introduced – and as they still do in countries that did not use those jabs.
Nearly all these deaths – over 90 percent, closer to 95 percent under a more expansive definition of Covid deaths – now occur in people who have taken Covid shots.
What’s gone wrong, and what happens next?
Those questions will not be easily answered.
Later this week, I hope to come back to one crucial issue – the fact that mRNA jabbed people struggle to develop antibodies to parts of Sars-Cov-2 other than the spike protein even after infection.
But even as I have been chasing that question I am struck by how LITTLE research has been done on it. The best paper I can find on the role anti-nucleocapsid antibodies may play in the development of immunity was published in 2020.
Governments and scientific researchers need to stop trying to ignore or even hide the obvious crisis now unfolding. They need to stop pretending the answer is more rounds of boosters, which at best will increase spike antibodies for a couple of months – at the cost of unknown long-term damage. (More mRNA boosters are politically untenable in any case, especially in the United States, where fewer than half of vaccinated people have taken them.)
Before they can do anything else, they need to stop pretending that what is happening now is in any way what they promised.
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