abouxi@iceland.edu
Xi, the ruler of China and/or the people around him deserve credit for finally abandoning Chinas zero Covid policy.
We did not like how Xi treated the Canadian leader at the G20 conference, where Xi did not give the Canadian leader the due respect he deserves. However by ceding to the will of the Chinese people, who had been peacefully protesting, sometimes just with a blank piece of paper, Xi has proved to be much more of a man, than Trudaue. Trudoe had an opportunity to remove restrictions towards the end of the truckers anti-COVID measures protests. Most nations where already easing restrictions in response to the Omicron variant. But instead Trudue doubled down on the truckers, and proceeded to block their funding.
It is easy to criticize China as being too authorities, they certainly are, but we must be equally critical of what is happening closer to home.
The same goes for giving credit, where credit is due. It serves no purpose to be always critical. E.g. like the western media which has rightly criticized China for its non-sensical zero covid policy, but which are now criticizing China for lifting those same restrictions. That is hypocrisy.
Of course China could have done better, by easing the restrictions in summer when peoples D-vitamin levels are higher, but better late than never.
A Zero-COVID policy does not make sense in a world that is international. No matter if you try to isolate the country from the rest of the world, people will find ingenious or not so ingenious ways of crossing borders and so even if the country managed to eradicate the virus within, their would always be new cases stemming from abroad bringing the country back to square one. It does not even take people to be crossing borders, animals that also carry the disease respect no national boundaries. The damage that these measures do not only do to the economy but to peoples psychological and physical well being should not be underestimated. Also it makes no sense to take such strong measures against a disease that is no more dangerous than other ailments that people suffer from which we are doing very little about. E.g. lack of fiber induced illnesses, lack of sun or Vitamin-D, ailments induced by bad diet, lack of sleep and exercise, alcohol, smoking, vaping, drugs, consequence of prescribed drugs such as opiates and blood thinners.
We should also be aware that there is a distinction that is often ignored that is dying from COVID alone or dying from a combination of factors including COVID. Most of the deaths that are blamed on COVID are actually the latter. Meaning that the people who died would have died anyway within a short period of time. This is why measures that lead to lower COVID deaths initially do not translate into a lower death rate in the medium term.
There are forces that would like to continue restrictions in the west for normal people (the executives would no doubt find their own ways of circumventing them for themselves). We must guard against such inappropriate interventions in our societies. There are signs that people have had enough of these COVID-restrictions, these campaigns of fear everywhere and that politicians are finally aware that it is political suicide to return to those days no matter how much bribes are on offer.
It is also time to investigate what went wrong and not to listen to excuses. If a politicians orders vaccines for countless billions with an SMS than oops the SMS has been deleted is not a valid answer and her husband should not be rewarded with a job that is funded by the EU and big pharma.
There are many things to investigate, not only the origin of the virus in China, but various attempts to steer the discourse and the research, for example:
How could one editor at Harvard University nullify the advice of 10 departments at Harvard.
How and why did NICE (UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) put as a research of top relevance, a research that was based on peoples response to the virus during the recent pandemic that referred to some blood measurements made more than a decade earlier. Why did the media report on the report without noticing this.
How and why did the otherwise respected journal Spiegel (which received funding from WHO) publish an article that tore down legitimate scientific research on Vitamin-D
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