Events have prodded China to speed up the schedule for a shift of Covid focus to treatment rather than prevention, according to sources close to the State Council leadership.
The sources have reaffirmed to Asia Times that decisions reached just prior to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China to relax Covid controls have not changed. Indeed, preparations for the change have been underway since early October, they say – but now, with omicron cases surging and protests threatening to get out of hand, the matter has become more urgent.
According to the sources, further relaxation is now scheduled to start in the course of January when Beijing will formally announce the end of the pandemic and classify Covid as an endemic infectious disease. That’s earlier than previously planned.
Health officials and their direct superiors who have been promoting heightened control measures to prevent death of the elderly have been overruled. Local government officials who are deemed to have promoted measures deemed excessive – not in line with the 20 new guidelines for easing Covid Zero that were issued November 11 – will be reprimanded, according to the sources.
The US stock market on Monday foresaw that, in order to enact the implied dramatic change in policy, China not only will need to rely on production of its own mRNA vaccines; it must also rapidly conclude license production deals and arrange direct imports of mRNA vaccines from abroad.
Surge of new cases
As of early last month, the plan had been to keep the relaxed zero-Covid measures announced on November 11 in place through the Chinese New Year (late January 2023) holidays and leave it to the early March National People’s Congress and the new State Council to terminate zero-Covid.
The new omicron wave, exceeding even the high case levels experienced in April at the time of the total Shanghai lockdown, overthrew that timetable and the vision of orderly progress that it represented.
Uncertain of orders from Beijing, local officials vacillated between harsh control measures as in April and more lenient approaches. The process quickly took on the appearance of arbitrary and incoherent decision-making.
Small protests against lockdown and mass testing measures in various localities over the past several days have taken on the character of a protest movement – notably as students at elite universities like Tsinghua in Beijing joined in the protest and gave it an explicitly political, anti-government character not seen since the Tiananmen protest of 1989.
That, surely, is the last thing President Xi Jinping and his new CPC leadership team need as they attempt to establish a reputation of openness and economic and technological innovation.
Covid policy failures over the past two years have created the current impasse.
Having successfully controlled the original Wuhan coronavirus outbreak and several subsequent outbreaks with a combination of harsh, rapid testing and targeted lockdown measures, China failed to develop a potent mRNA-type vaccine such as the German BioNTech-designed Comirnaty vaccine widely produced worldwide.
Comirnaty is not greatly effective against the omicron variants of Covid-19, but at least greatly reduces the typical severity of the illness.
The traditional Chinese vaccines such as Sinovac proved not only far less effective against the original Covid variants, but nearly totally ineffective against omicron and incapable of mitigating infection severity. As omicron hit, China was left without defenses other than lockdown affecting hundreds of millions of people.
So now what? With the specter of another Shanghai-type lockdown looming in several major cities and protests growing, all signs are that the new CPC leadership team around premier-designate Li Qiang has pushed for, and is determined to chart, a path to live with Covid – as most of the world has done.
The plan is to concentrate all efforts on treatment of the disease – minimizing deaths rather than pursuing ultimately futile measures of prevention, which have become a major economic and political liability.
During his early November visit to Beijing, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took along 12 CEOs of major German companies, among them Ugur Sahin, head of the Mainz-based BioNTech vaccine maker. That was hardly an accident. German-Chinese collaboration in implementation of a key element in China’s new Covid policy is in the works.
Stock investors caught wind of the imminent shift in Chinese Covid policy, bidding up mRNA stocks aggressively at midday in the US Monday session. BioNTech rose sharply in the morning after Reuters reported that the German government is working to ensure that the German firm, the inventor of the mRNA vaccine, advances its joint venture with its Chinese partner.
Hours later the largest US manufacturer of mRNA vaccines, Catalent, jumped as investors calculated that China would draw upon spare capacity in the world pharmaceutical industry to buy hundreds of millions of doses.
Follow Uwe Parpart on Twitter at @uwe_parpart