Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

China's COVID Chaos A "Horrible Indictment" Of US Leadership For
Emulating CCP Lockdowns: Former White House Adviser

https://www.theepochtimes.com/t-lockdown

https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinas-covid-chaos-a-horrible-indictment-of-us-leadership-for-emulating-ccp-lockdowns-former-white-house-adviser_4950438.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/beijings-hardline-covid-19-response-pushes-shanghai-to-the-brink_4401908.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/dying-patients-declined-care-in-locked-down-xian-spark-anger-and-despair_4198147.html
https://youtu.be/UUYAuU4ryDw
https://www.theepochtimes.com/whether-you-live-or-die-no-one-cares-chinese-left-helpless-amid-covid-crisis_4948225.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-to-impose-mandatory-covid-tests-for-travelers-from-china_4950220.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/massive-harms-from-lockdowns-should-not-be-forgiven-dr-scott-atlas_4844772.html



If the world can learn one thing from the COVID chaos in China, it is
that “locking down does not work,” said healthcare policy adviser Dr.
Scott Atlas.

    “We don’t even know really the extent of the harms to their
population that they inflicted by locking down but we know anecdotally
that there were massive harms to people—they couldn’t get food, they
couldn’t get their own medications, people were imposing a completely
uncivilized, almost animalistic way,” Atlas, a previous White House
special coronavirus adviser and contributor to The Epoch Times, said
in an interview.

For almost three years, China’s ruling regime has imposed a severe
zero-COVID strategy, using strict lockdowns, centralized quarantines,
mass testing, and omnipresent surveillance to contain the virus’s
spread, leading to many residents being deprived of basic living
needs, and some even dying from a lack of care.

“This is a massive human rights violation,” Atlas said.

“All of their policies imposed on their public,” he said, referring to
China’s communist party (CCP), “is an example of one of the most
extraordinary violations of human rights that we have seen in modern
history.”
‘Flies in the Face of Common Sense’

The policy reversal that came without a transition plan accompanied an
exponential surge of cases that was quickly overwhelming the country’s
health system.

World Health Organization emergencies director Mike Ryan noted during
a global health briefing on Dec. 14 that this wave of COVID-19 now
seen in China is not due to the lifting of COVID restrictions, as it
started long before any easing of the zero-COVID policy.

    “I think that it’s very important to recognize that,” he said, adding,

    “The disease was spreading intensively because I believe the
control measures in themselves were not stopping the disease, and I
believe that the Chinese authorities have decided strategically that
that for them is not the best option anymore.”

Contrasting the few death cases the authorities have reported—11 since
the easing of COVID curbs earlier this month—was mounting anecdotal
evidence suggesting that the virus is fast spreading in Chinese cities
and fatalities are rising. Hospitals and funeral homes have been
filling up, with backlogs of bodies awaiting cremation.

The Chinese numbers, Atlas said, are “absurd” to think of.

“This just completely flies in the face of common sense,” he said.

“No one should believe the counting method that is reported by China,”
he added, noting that to “save face and justify their reckless harmful
lockdowns,” the regime would “necessarily have to say they had fewer
deaths.”

COVID-19 patients on gurneys at Tianjin First Center Hospital in
Tianjin, China, on Dec. 28, 2022. (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images)

“I don’t know how anyone would think that they have transparency on
how they’re counting.”

The lack of data from China has been so concerning that it has driven
the United States to impose a new travel curb mandating COVID tests
for travelers from China.
Lockdown Success ‘Fantasy’

That the regime has been “lying about the numbers” from the beginning,
Atlas said, poses a troubling question.

In January 2020, after suppressing whistleblower doctors and
journalists trying to sound warning about the emerging virus, China
became the world’s first country to shut down cities in response to
COVID-19 spiraling out of control. As the virus spread, the lockdown
method that Beijing insisted was effective was then quickly copied by
other countries around the world, such as the United States.

Atlas, an early lockdown critic, has previously enumerated the toll
that such policies inflict on the public, from learning loss and
mental health damage to a rise in substance abuse.

“There was this false belief that somehow China had ‘beaten the
virus.’ This was a completely absurd lie—a fantasy.”

Health workers wait for people to scan a health code to test for the
COVID-19 coronavirus in the Jing’an district in Shanghai, China, on
Dec. 22, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

It was a lie that Atlas believes policymakers “blind to science”
bought without question.

    “It’s one thing that it’s a society like China [that] imposes the
draconian policies on its on its public, because that’s what
totalitarian societies do,” he said. “But it’s another thing—it’s
extraordinary that governments of supposedly ‘free societies’ would
attempt to impose these sorts of policies on the public—and even more
sad is the acquiescence of people to such policies.”

    “It’s a horrible indictment of American leadership to emulate a
totalitarian society like China.”

Separate from the fact that locking down can’t get rid of a virus,
Atlas sees two things that the world hasn’t grasped about the CCP’s
“inhumane policies”: “the true failure of their policies and the
massive harms on their own people.”

“The worst thing for China, or any totalitarian society, is to have
people start realizing that the government policies are failures,” he
said. “Because the only reason that the totalitarian societies exist
is they have power.”