More to the point is that they care more about "zero covid" than other aspects of public welfare. The necessity of the lockdown for omicron, which is less deadly than previous variants, is dubious so if they are unable to properly organize a lockdown without unreasonably affecting welfare and livelihood, they should not have unless they do not care about them.
The Leninists have a history of human rights abuse and atrocities. It is always the party before the people. For example, in China's great famine, tens of millions died because of bad central planning and they want people to believe it was just a natural disaster. Also, Tiananmen Massacre. This is nothing new.
Omicron has a similar severity to Original Covid. Vax rates are low among the elderly in China, so it would be disaster if they lost control.
Assuming they are successful in containing the outbreak in Shanghai, China will come through this with disease and death rates orders of magnitude lower than the US. Their history may be bad, but in this case they have it right.
A hard lockdown being needed at this late stage in the pandemic signals poor decision making more than anything. Why aren't their elderly widely vaccinated, and why are they still relying on their significantly worse domestically made vaccine?
> They are not vaccinated because they did not want.
That is a perfect answer on the individual level. For example: Why is Bob’s uncle not vacinated? He didn’t want to.
On a population level it is insuficient. When you are asking why only X% of a large population is vaccinated, you can look at larger forces at play.
Is the availablr vacine working? Rationally is the risk of getting the vacine worth the benefit of it based on what we know? ( This is the bedrock of the question. )
Assuming it is worth it, are the people who have this information able to communicate this in a credible way to the population? If not what made the expert not credible? What could have been done differently for them to be more credible in the eye of the population? ( This is equally important! Having a good working vacine, which is not trusted because the system squandered away trust is tragic. )
Was the logistics of the vaccination well executed? ( Less people will get vaccinated if its not convenient for them. )
Are there any other factors which affected the vacination rate?
These are all valid questions, and they are all enclosed in the original one: why only X% of this population is vacinated?
> i am wondering about your question.
That is a good thing, but it sounds like maybe you are insinuating something? If not sorry for the misunderstanding. If yes it would be better if you could spell out what you are wondering so we can discuss it.
China wouldn't be in this mess if they had followed New Zealand's approach of vaccinating all the old people with a high quality vaccine. Then you can just open up again because the mortality risk of Covid is the same as the annual flu (according to data out of the UK).
In a country with complete control over the information ecosystem, how can it be that so many old Chinese people don't want to take the vaccine? Is anti-vax sentiment the main reason for low vaccination rates among old people in China compared to New Zealand?
>In a country with complete control over the information ecosystem, how can it be that so many old people don't want to take the vaccine?
Because nobody wanted to be held responsible for any adverse reactions to the vaccine. The sordid state of medical liability culture and vaccine hesitancy in China would take too long to explain here so let's just say that the distrust runs pretty deep, and the government is understandably cautious with the vaccine program. One might even say too cautious as the vaccine came with a long list of contraindications that cover every category of geriatric illness, and it was not even approved for the 60+ age group for quite some time.
The propagandists in China did all they could to portray the vaccine as safe and effective but stopped short of actually enacting a vaccine mandate. The medics were more concerned with self-preservation, going as far as telling young couples to avoid pregnancy for 6-12 months after getting the vaccine just in case it might cripple the foetus. All of the these mixed messages only reinforced the existing suspicions that the vaccine was rushed and unsafe.
Of course none of these actually matters. Why waste political capital when the problem is effectively socialised among 1.4 billion people? Just keep covid out of China and everyone will live happily thereafter, right?
Australia and NZ, in contrast, deliberately made it very difficult to get any kind of exemption for the vaccine. Not to mention that both countries had endemic Delta variant by the time vaccination began in its earnest. Fear should not be underestimated as a motivator - ethnic Indians topped vaccination rates in multiple western countries because everybody had lost a relative to covid in India.
So this sounds plausible, but since Xi is an autocrat, and since they can just bury/censor a small handful of adverse outcomes, why wouldn't Xi want to ram this through and override the risk aversion of the medics on the ground?
Just because something could be done, does not imply that it would be done. I can't speak for the decision makers, but it's clear that they have decided that it wasn't worth it. And that was probably the right call until Omicron.
