China’s Vain Struggle For Covid Zero

In pursuit of the mythical Covid zero, China is now pushing vaccines on children as young as three years old.

Thus far, China has administered more than 2.2 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines—almost three times more than India, the country that has doled out the second most Covid jabs. More than 70 percent of China’s 1.4 billion population is fully vaccinated. China’s two most widely used Covid-19 vaccines, the Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines, were approved for use in children from ages three to 17 over the summer; however, China has been somewhat hesitant to vaccinate children under the age of 12—until now, as Covid cases have slightly increased.

China created the now ubiquitous formula of locking down, quarantining, testing, and restricting travel in order to control the spread of Covid-19, implementing it on a much larger scale and with much harsher penalties than Western governments. But don’t rule out the possibility that many politicians and health officials in the West wish they could exert that level of control—see Australia, for example. Almost since the beginning of America’s pandemic response, the corporate media has lauded China for purportedly stopping the spread of the virus through these extreme measures. One New York Times opinion—granted, by Thomas Friedman—was even headlined, “China Got Better. We Got Sicker. Thanks, Trump.”