China’s sudden pivot away from zero-Covid is striking, to say the least. Less than three months ago President Xi Jinping declared, at the Communist Party’s quinquennial conference:
We have adhered to the supremacy of the people and the supremacy of life. We are committed to putting people and lives first and adhere to dynamic zero-Covid.
Now, following protests and a growing failure to contain outbreaks, the CCP has dictated a 180-degree turn to ‘Let it rip’. Mass testing is gone, along with quarantine hostels. Borders have been opened, both for incoming and outgoing travel. Infection rates have spiralled as a result, with estimates of c. 250 million cases in the first three weeks of December, or a little more than a sixth of the Chinese population. This is massive, to say the least, compared with last spring’s omicron spikes elsewhere in the Far East. Half the travellers on incoming flights from China to Italy have proved to be infected, supporting the view that cases have increased explosively.
If anyone believes that masks – still worn everywhere in China – have merit, these numbers should disabuse them. There are no data on the vaccination status of the infected, but it’s likewise clear that the locally used vaccines – classical inactivated virus preparations – have failed to prevent mass transmission and circulation of SARS-CoV2.
Hong Kong’s omicron wave showed that these Chinese vaccines reduced short-term COVID-19 mortality among the over-80s compared with the unvaccinated, though less than for those given mRNA products. Whether a reduction will be achieved or maintained in China is anyone’s guess: many of those vaccinated received their shots months ago and any protection is likely to have diminished markedly.
We’ll likely never know: China has helpfully stopped publishing daily figures for infections and deaths. The only useful signal is that crematoria are unduly busy. Even with a mortality rate of 0.1%, 250 million cases translates to 250,000 deaths.
The West is, or should be, a spectator at this fiasco. We should merely hope that the long-suffering Chinese recognise the futility of what that has been inflicted upon them – mandatory testing, vaccine passports to enter shops and offices, or to catch the train; being quarantined or sealed in their own apartments if they have the misfortune to test positive; having their infected children taken for lonely separate isolation; having their pets slaughtered.
We must hope that, in time, the Chinese have the opportunity repay Xi Jinping and the CCP for its callousness. Particularly for persisting with this cruel insanity through 2022, even when every other country in East Asia had recognised that omicron was milder and unstoppable.
Unfortunately, China’s infection spike is causing a recrudescence of folly in her neighbours and in the West. Japan, Taiwan, India the U.S. and Italy have all taken to testing incoming visitors from China for Covid. This list looks set to grow. Lord Bethell, a former U.K. Health Minister, is calling for the U.K. to follow, and the Telegraph tells us that Rishi Sunak has the topic ‘under review’, as does the EU.
The ‘logic’ is that China’s surge may generate new SARS-CoV-2 variants and that import of these might “put us back to square one”. Assorted academics have been wheeled out to support this claim. Shares in Novacyt and Genedrive, who manufacture Covid tests, have surged. But the ‘logic’ is nonsense, and should be called out as such, for two reasons.
First, experience shows that, even in a time of strict international restrictions, the global spread of major SARS-CoV-2 lineages cannot not be stopped. New variants will continue to emerge. If they have an advantage, they will disseminate worldwide. We can’t do much to prevent this, and should stop trying.
Second, there is no good reason to suppose that China will prove an especially fertile ground for the proliferation of new variants. Mutants gain traction where they have an advantage. That is how Darwinian evolution works.
Advantages comes when spread of the established type is limited but the mutant evades the limitation. An example is if non-pharmaceutical restrictions constrain the established type but have less effect on its more-transmissible mutant – for example, one with a lower infective dose. The alpha variant’s initial rise to prominence during the U.K.’s second (November 2020) lockdown, provides a plausible example. A second case is when existing immunity – from vaccination or infection – constrains the established type, but not its variant. The briefly-protective adenovirus vector and mRNA vaccines used in the West (and Russia) solely target the virus’s highly mutable Spike protein. As immunity wanes, this creates selective conditions favouring partly or substantially evasive types – e.g. omicron – with an altered Spike protein.
These conditions don’t look to apply in China, where the already-very-transmissible omicron variant is ripping into an infection-naïve population, poorly protected with inactivated-virus vaccines. Since these are based on the whole virus, not just the Spike protein, they might provide a broad selective pressure if they were effective. But the sheer speed of omicron’s expansion shows that they aren’t effective at all, and therefore they will not advantage any mutant.
There is much to blame the Chinese Government for. The virus most probably escaped from a lab in Wuhan. The CCP have done their utmost to prevent and confuse investigation of this topic. They provided the terrible lockdown model, causing massive collateral damage to the rest of the world, as well as to themselves. Chinese twitter bots encouraged panic in the West, pumping out clips of plague victims dropping in the Wuhan streets. China’s own citizens have been treated appallingly.
But suggesting that China is now the likeliest source of new variants, simply owing to its infection surge, is to misunderstand how evolutionary pressure works. And imagining that we can stop new variants, wherever they come from, is to disregard everything we should have learnt these past three years.
Dr. David Livermore is Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia.
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This for the Guardian, et. al. is an easy sell for people who don’t know baseball and accept all such climate-is-a-disaster story.
Easy sell to the walking brain dead
Or Guardian readers, as their called!
Maybe better players, stronger players, bigger men in general, far better bats and technology, a lot more training? Hitting, or not hitting a ball, has nothing to do with plant food.
It really is a cult of idiots, with St Greta the Moron and others as the apostles all supported by the miracles of fake data, fake studies and endless bullshit, not to mention money, money, money. $cience.
Better results are all to do with the weather, eh? Who knew. What a total insult to all the dedicated sportspeople, coaches, trainers and specialist sports scientists out there who have been honing skills, techniques, diet & nutrition, even aerodynamic improvements to kit and clothing over the last few decades.
I hear Pigs will fart a semi tone higher by the end of the century because of global warming. —–We must “Act Now”. Scientists would like to keep pig farts from rising above F Major by reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. ——–Lets all get a heat pumps to help reduce the pig pumps.
“The climate crisis is reported to be causing more home runs in baseball”. ——–Why speak of this “climate crisis” as if it is something we can all see in front of us like a pillar box or an elephant? I know pillar boxes and elephants exist because I have seen them. I have NOT seen a Climate Crisis. ——–By using that terminology, which is the language of political agenda’s, all we do is surrender to the narrative that a crisis actually exists, and we can all see that in front of us and by looking at the climate data. ———–But wait a minute. The IPCC themselves admit they see no human signal in the climate data at this time. There is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event. Not storms, not floods, not droughts not wildfires —NOTHING. So where is this “crisis”? —————- It exists entirely within speculative climate models full of assumptions that do not include many of the parameters, and others are simply guessed at. Is it any wonder that those models and real world observations continue to drift apart as each year passes? ———-But I can tell you where there is a genuine “crisis”. It is the Energy Crisis where politicians pandering to the UN /WEF /EU Sustainable Development agenda are taking away our affordable reliable energy of coal and gas and replacing it with unaffordable unreliable energy of wind and sun. This is a genuine crisis and as the UK seeks to pretend to save the planet harder and faster than every other country with it’s absurd Climate Change Act and NET ZERO policies that we are forced in law to adhere to, our standard of living is plummeting. Millions are being forced into energy poverty and having to be bailed out with monthly payments because they cannot pay the bills. Some may say this is only temporary and is because of the war in Ukraine, and that certainly has masked the negative effects of the silly green agenda, but prices were already rising year on year before that. The general public mostly do not understand how energy works and are being conned into thinking that they can save the whole planet if they only accept more and more and more turbines. There is currently a Hydrogen experiment going on in Fife in Scotland where residents are being asked to sign up to get Hydrogen heating fitted into their houses in Buckhaven instead of their current gas central heating. These people will likely have no idea of what hydrogen really is, how expensive it is, and how corrosive it is. They will likely not realise it is the most volatile element in the Universe and isn’t actually a fuel. It has to manufactured and this makes it very expensive. ——We are putting ourselves through all of this clutter at astronomical expense all based on this idea there is a “Climate Crisis” which real world observations do not show. —We CAN see a pillar box. We CANNOT see a “Climate Crisis”
Of course you can see the climate crisis – just count the home runs and it’s slam-dunk.
I have NEVER and I mean NEVER understood “climate crisis.”
We live – define ‘live’ – on a planet as a part of the cosmos. We are a function of the planet. Climate is a given. Accept what we have. Climate is Climate. That’s it.
Next thing we know some Next Tuesday will be telling us that we need to move 1.337 degrees further away from the Sun, to reduce fictitious ‘global warming’ and to achieve this huge tow ropes will be fixed to the planet and these will be connected to thousands of space rockets which will pull us to safety.
World is full of evil Nutters.
We wont need tow ropes. A carefully timed massed nuclear explosion somewhere like, I dont know, say, Ukraine, should shift the planet a few microns further away.
Fair point Neil.
Three things emerge from this story.
The message I take home from this is that climate change can have some positive outcomes.
It is shame that so many plants bought on the promise of a Med climate in Britain have died as a consequence of the cold snap late last year. My olive stick (formerly a tree) is testament to that along with numerous other casualties. Thanks, BBC Gardeners World, for your advice.
This ‘analysis’ by some no-doubt lucratively rewarded academics is so laughably weak and anti-scientific as to be almost not worth commenting on. It parodies itself (as does The Guardian’s uncritical and propagandist utilisation of it).
However, though I was already an emotional wreck after discovering that home runs in US baseball have apparently increased by 0.9% due to humanity’s evil industrial ways I couldn’t resist carrying out a fact check on another heart-breaking claim made in the report / article:
“Though the Texas Rangers’ previous ballpark opened as recently as 1994, the summer heat in the Dallas region proved so uncomfortable that the club moved to a climate-controlled $1.2bn new stadium with a retractable roof in 2020. Among the league’s 30 stadiums, eight have retractable or fixed roofs. More roofs on ballparks is going to be unavoidable. That is frustrating,” said Christopher Callahan, the lead author of the study. “One of the joys of baseball is sitting in the open air, sitting under the blue sky and the breeze.” However, he added: “At a certain point over the course of the next couple of decades it’s going to be unsafe to play baseball games in very high temperatures.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/07/climate-crisis-more-home-runs-baseball-study
Having looked at the relevant data I have to say it seems rather strange to link the Texas Rangers’ move to a new stadium in 2020 to temperatures in the Dallas region allegedly heading rapidly towards microwave levels (again due to that nasty polluting humanoid species) when the historic record summer temperatures of 113F (June) and 111F (July) were recorded in 1980 and 1954, 43 and 69 years ago respectively. Moreover the average date of the 12 monthly record highs is 1982, 41 years in the past.
https://dallascreates.org/locations-and-venues/dallas-area-information/historic-average-temperatures-in-dallas-texas/#:~:text=Dallas%2C%20TX%20%E2%80%93%20Monthly%20Averages%20%26%20Records%20%E2%80%93%20from%20Intellicast&text=The%20highest%20recorded%20temperature%20was,8%C2%B0F%20in%201899
It sometimes feels as if the whole ‘Climate Change’ scam is the greatest instance of mass trolling combined with ‘dupers’ delight’ in history.
Facts are such inconvenient things, especially when attempting to promote an agenda. Or as Mark Twain put it ———–“Ah yes science, One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture from such a trifling investment of facts”.
There’s a word that springs to mind to describe theories like this, which also describes an essential part of the male anatomy.
Guardian: Climate change increases home runs.
In the Guardian every day is April Fools day
************************************
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
Excellent piece on climate change by Matt Ehret
https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/an-earth-day-special-in-defense-of
I bet both of their readers were mortified. The Giddian is giving Private Eye a run for its money
Analytically adept at challenging climate orientated junk science ad always Chris. Sky has been peddling the narrative via the threat to football. Obviously any ground near the sea will soon be inundated. Carrow Road will replace seating with Greta designed Lilos. Seriously these people just make stuff up and very few journos challenge them. GB news had a Cameroon Climate Goon called Gemill on. Such a patronising bell end, he is heading up the Climate Party which is standing in the 100 most marginal seats to publicise the “emergency”. He is the nice (passive aggressive), middle class face of XR and he could have been manufactured in a laboratory
He boasts of being funded by rich donors and the City of course. Sadly both Bev Turner and Andrew Pierce though pushing back on this odious hack were way underpowered. He just steamrollered through with his ridiculous perspective that we should go further and faster to land green jobs. We need you in there Chris putting the case against this insane drive to impoverish the masses. We also need a guide to climate lies to counteract this narrative aimed at the few critical journos and for sceptics like us. If readers could think of three lines what would they be?