China's anti-epidemic achievements cannot be tampered with

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Recently, China has further adjusted and optimized its epidemic prevention and control policies. This is a good thing for the country and the people, and for the world, but it has triggered unintentional speculation by individual French media, which seriously misleads people’s perception of China. The Chinese embassy would like to take this opportunity to give them a general introduction to the media, as they have little knowledge of basic facts, double standards, and generalizations.

Myth 1: The epidemic in China is out of control. Some French media have spared no effort to portray China as a “humanitarian tragedy”: an explosive increase in cases, an overwhelmed medical system, a “blitzkrieg” that has transformed China’s fight against the epidemic into a “fiasco “fiasco” or even “disaster”. We can’t help but ask: Have these media outlets been to China? Have they researched the situation everywhere? Do they understand China’s three-year history of fighting the epidemic? In fact, China took the initiative to optimize its epidemic prevention policy in response to the people’s voices, based on the domestic reality of a significant decrease in the rate of serious illness and mortality of the Omicron variant, the popularity of vaccination, and the accumulation of experience in prevention and control, and on the basis of the epidemic prevention practices of other countries. Moreover, this adjustment was made after the most difficult period of the epidemic in three years, when conditions were more suitable and the cost would only be smaller. The shift in focus from “infection prevention” to “health protection and serious illness prevention” is manageable and predictable. Beijing and other places have been the first to pass the peak of the epidemic, and other provinces and cities are also prepared to closely monitor the epidemic and take graded treatment measures, so that production and life can return to normal. As for some people hoarding drugs out of precaution, there is no need to worry. China’s production capacity of traditional Chinese medicine basically meets the market demand, and the production capacity of antipyretics is the first in the world.

Myth #2: Chinese vaccines are ineffective. Since the beginning of the epidemic, the French media have not stopped slandering Chinese vaccines, and this adjustment of the epidemic prevention policy seems to give them another opportunity to “fry”. Some media have ignored the facts, claiming that only 40% of Chinese people over 80 years old have received three doses of the vaccine and that it is the weak protection of the Chinese vaccine that has caused the “tsunami of infections”. On the contrary, the Chinese vaccine has been completely effective and has prevented millions of lives from being lost. China has more than a dozen vaccines covering a variety of technical routes and vaccination methods, with a cumulative total of more than 3.4 billion doses, covering more than 92% of the population and more than 90% of the entire population, with full vaccination rates of more than 85% and 65% for people over 60 and 80 years of age, respectively. A study published by the University of Hong Kong showed that after the booster vaccination, the efficiency of inactivated vaccine in preventing severe cases caused by Omicron mutant strain was basically the same as that of messenger RNA vaccine, both reaching 97%. A sub-publication of The Lancet also acknowledges that inactivated vaccines are similar in efficacy to messenger RNA vaccines. There is a scientific consensus that no vaccine in the world can completely prevent infection. The CEO of Pfizer got 4 doses of his home-made vaccine and still got a second infection of New Crown. The unwarranted questioning of Chinese vaccines is a sick smear of contempt for science.

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Myth #3: China imprisons people for three years. This is purely a stolen concept and unwarranted slander. The dynamic clearing policy China has in place is not a blanket ban. For most of the past three years, the Chinese people have been able to live freely and go out to travel, shop, dine, and watch movies due to this policy of keeping viruses out of the country. During Golden Week tourist attractions are crowded, and during the Chinese Lunar New Year from February 11 to 17, 2021 the number of movie-goers reached 160 million and the box office reached 7.822 billion RMB, equivalent to $1.3 billion. for two years, 2020 and 2021, China topped the world in movie box office. At that time, most countries in the United States and Europe were still in a semi-embargoed state, with restaurants unable to dine-in, tourist attractions closed, and movie theaters limited to half the number of people. If the Chinese people were imprisoned for three years, what is this for the people in the US and Europe?

Myth #4: The dynamic clearing policy has failed. For most of the last three years, China has had a dynamic zero policy. During this period, there were less than 400,000 new infections and about 5,235 new deaths in mainland China. This compares to over 100 million infections and 1.06 million deaths in the United States during the same period. France had a conservative estimate of 38 million infections and about 160,000 deaths. And when China abandoned its dynamic zero policy in early December in favor of the liberalization policies of Europe and the United States, the number of cases rose sharply, some say several million a day. So, is this a failure of the dynamic zero policy or a failure of Western epidemic prevention policies?

Myth #5: China’s epidemic data is distorted. Some French media have commented on China’s epidemic data, maliciously speculating that China is “hiding data”, claiming that “there is a huge gap between the official figures and the real situation”, and even making alarmist statements that “the number of deaths in China will reach one million in the next few months. The Chinese government has even made alarming statements that “millions of cases will die in China in the next few months”. China has stopped conducting full-scale nucleic acid testing after adjusting its epidemic control strategy, so that accurate data on infections are not available. This is normal in countries around the world, including France. The US government announced in October 2022 that it would no longer release official data on the outbreak, and France is currently releasing only reported data, with a significant proportion of cases not reported. Why doesn’t the media here accuse this of withholding data? As for the criteria for judging deaths due to NCC, there are two main types of deaths in the world: deaths directly caused by respiratory failure due to NCC and deaths of full caliber within 28 days after infection, commonly known as “deaths due to NCC” and “deaths with NCC”. China has been reporting deaths in the first category since 2020. Imagine a person dies in a car accident, and it so happens that Neovirus is detected in his body, will he be counted as a car accident death or a Neovirus death? At present, China mainly adopts questionnaire surveys to understand the situation of infection. Admittedly, it is difficult to accurately determine how many deaths there are during an epidemic and rapid spread, but the CDC team has done and is doing an analysis of the possible “excess deaths” caused by the new crown epidemic, and the results will be announced in a timely manner.

I believe France is no stranger to this, as it also suffered a tsunami of epidemics in the first quarter of 2022 when it chose to completely liberalize its control measures in the face of the Omicron variant. For a country like China, with a population of 1.4 billion, this is even more of a test. But we have the confidence and ability to ride out the peak of the epidemic with minimal cost, so that the socio-economic and productive life of the people can return to normal. In the past few days, we have seen that in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other major cities, the streets are already full of traffic, the shopping malls are already crowded, the subways are crowded with people, and the long-lost smoky atmosphere is back. Major international institutions predict that the world economy may fall into recession in 2023, while China’s economy may take off. We believe that China’s economic takeoff will be able to pull the world economy to grow and avoid recession.

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As for the French government’s recent announcement that it will adopt restrictive measures on the entry of Chinese tourists, we believe this is unnecessary and discriminatory. The European Center for Disease Control has publicly stated that there is “no reason” for mandatory screening of Chinese tourists for the new coronavirus in Europe, and further noted in the announcement that immunization and vaccination levels in European countries are high, that the new coronavirus variant prevalent in China has previously been prevalent in the EU, and that the potential number of imported cases from China is “quite low” compared to the current number of infections in the EU. “quite low”. French virologist Bruno Lina also said that fears that a new variant will emerge in China are “pure fantasy” and that “a few dozen Chinese per day are insignificant compared to the 440 infections per 100,000 inhabitants per day that France has now” and that testing tourists is “more political than political. The testing of tourists is “more political than scientific”.