If you write for the New York Times, expect to receive articles condemning China for causing its people tremendous hardship and inconvenience to prevent mass deaths from the coronavirus.
The New York Times clearly shares the view of the capitalist class that the world priority must be to get back to business as usual, to continue making profits regardless of the virus’ toll on the global working class. Its message: coexist with the virus, ignore its presence, and don’t bother collecting statistics on COVID-19 infection rates and deaths.
Shame on the poor Times commentators charged with writing these subsequent articles attacking China for COVID-19 policies that prevented mass deaths experienced in the United States and much of the West. Month after month, they churn out rants apparently unverified by their publishers.
Most of its statistics are easily refuted by the Times website, “Tracking Coronavirus Vaccinations Around the World”.
Writing for the Times on Sept. 7, Vivian Wang says China’s zero-COVID policy “goes too far.” Wang suggests that China join the rest of the world and learn to live with the coronavirus. But what would it be like for China?
the facts don’t lie
As Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) repeatedly pointed out in response to the Times articles, if China had taken the same approach to the pandemic as the United States, 4.5 million more Chinese would have died.
In the United States, with a population of 331.45 million, more than one million people have died since the outbreak began in early 2020. The country continues to see spikes in COVID-19 deaths in 2022 from variants of omicron. There are currently 450 COVID-19 deaths per day in the United States, about 160,000 deaths per year if the trend continues, a fact not mentioned by either Wang or Times columnist Austin Ramzy who writes from Hong Kong.
To date, China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has only recorded 5,226 deaths from COVID-19 as of this spring, when an outbreak in Hong Kong pushed the figure to 15,000. Ramzy wrote the Times’ latest attack on China on September 8. China’s “zero COVID” policy, he says, “has been a drag on China’s economy, travel and daily life,” as the blockade has led to “food shortages and other daily necessities in some cases.”
Perhaps, as he is writing from Hong Kong, Mr. Ramzy was unaware of the resistance that COVID-19 exerted on most Western economies, including the United States, where the shortage of food and basic necessities such as toilet paper, it was really a daily crisis. At least in China, most people survived the obstacles, unlike the millions who died in Europe and the United States.
Ramzy also apparently did not bother to look at China’s GDP, which is expected to grow 2.2% in 2020 and 8.1% in 2021. According to FAIR, Goldman Sachs predicts that China’s GDP growth for 2022 will be around. 3.0%, compared to 1.3% in the United States.
Vaccine controversy
Ramzy accused China of “not vaccinating the elderly”, citing the thousands of deaths that occurred in Hong Kong this year due to the wave of homicides. He does not mention that Hong Kong’s health system follows the Western model and is totally independent of Chinese vaccination policies.
He and other Times writers committed to attacking China for refusing to approve Western mRNA vaccines fail to acknowledge that vaccination programs developed by major American pharmaceutical companies are proving far from adequate to stem the resurgence of new ones. vaccines. What started as a “breakthrough” case among vaccinated people in the United States, who contracted COVID-19 in the summer of 2021, is becoming the norm. Not so with Chinese vaccines.
The Times articles attacking China began at the start of the pandemic. Some of the early suggestions that Chinese laboratories might have been responsible for producing the virus were later disproved by the World Health Organization and other international scientists.
One of the main differences between socialist China and the capitalist United States has been exposed by the failure of the profit-driven American healthcare system to meet the demands of the COVID-19 crisis. This is still being experienced in 2022, when thousands of health workers picket lines in massive strikes across the country.
It cannot be denied that China, as a workers state, has policies designed to benefit and protect the working class. And China has provided vaccination assistance to other workers around the world. Times writers often attack China’s COVID-19 policy for being “political,” but ignore the Times agenda as one of the leading political voices of the United States and the global capitalist ruling class.
How many lives will be lost due to these “business as usual” policies?
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