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China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

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Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#81
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CCP maintains legitimacy by performing better than the international community at governance. CCP can’t use international vaccines as it would make their claims of technical superiority appear false. CCP can’t try “living with the virus” policies as their subjects believe the outside world is in chaos due to those policies. World Cup shows the truth, that the barbarians are having fun and living life due to better po…

It's bizarre they're still pushing zero-covid so much, even without vaccines, Covid is dangerous but it's not apocalyptic.

It's apocalyptic when there's basically no immunity in a population (no prior infection and sub-par vaccination) and you have a variant that's 10x more transmissible than the original. Think of what happens when it rips through 1B+ people at the same time (think early pandemic NYC, but 10x worse). You'd end up with 1% of the population dying over the span of a month or so. That's not a desirable outcome...

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#82
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand. How does "lab-leak vs non-lab-leak" relate to this?

If the virus originated in a lab, then it is very likely that the CCP knows a lot about its behavior. The grandparent comment is implying that the CCP is acting based on something they know that they haven’t shared with the rest of the world.

Or far more likely are the reasons listed below.

Sad to see these conspiracy theories voted higher than the more plausible scientific explanation below.

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#83
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand. How does "lab-leak vs non-lab-leak" relate to this?

If it's a lab-leak it means the virus was potentially well studied before the leak, and it's effects known. Therefore the government could know a lot more about it than they claim.

Yes but what "knowledge" would be relevant at this stage? The virus has been through multiple rounds of mutation and has been well-studied. The amount of things that are a) possible to discern before it was released c) a surprise to the scientific community and c) is still applicable feels like it would be very small - barring sci-fi scenarios.

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#84
post #13

I find much more interesting how Twitter is now flooded with accounts which are suddenly posting NSFW escort tweets containing Chinese city names in Chinese characters and one account is able to post 3000 tweets in 24 hours to flood search results with nonsense. https://twitter.com/dong_mengyu/status/1596749168462401536

That's a state-sponsored attack. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/27/twitter...

Attack? The Chinese communist government is merely exercising their freedom of speech. /s

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also provided the genetic sequencing used to create the mRNA vaccines and then… didn’t use them.

It’s not clear to me why China wouldn’t just get Pfizer and/or Moderna to sell white label versions of their vaccines to at least vaccinate the older population in China. And if not the US vaccines then the Oxford vaccine, which is being sold without a profit even in the West and is far superior to the Chinese equivalent, would be a cheaper option. A big driver of the problem however is that a regime built on control…

The challenge is not about getting better vaccines, but actually pushing vaccines to the older population.

For those >= 80 years old, Only 65.7% had two shots and 40% had booster [1]. This is very low compared to, for example, Singapore. [2] (>90% three shots for >= 60 y.o. group)

[1] https://www.caixin.com/2022-11-16/101965816.html (paywall, the data is in preview tho) [2] https://www.moh.gov.sg/covid-19/vaccination/statistics

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China already has several highly effective vaccines. The problem is that a significant fraction of elderly people don't want to get vaccinated. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore had the exact same problem with vaccine hesitancy among the elderly. It's a cultural thing.

That's strange. My father was a voluntary in the polio vaccination in Argentina in ¿1956?. My mother also remember that epidemic. I guess old people here is one of the more conscious groups about how important are the vaccines.

The polio vaccine is different though. First it is not a mrna vaccine, second it is ~100% efficient in case of 3 doses.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/effectiveness-dur...

"Two doses of inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) are 90% effective or more against paralytic polio; three doses are 99% to 100% effective."

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#87
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that once they lift it up / fail to contain an outbreak, it will be a devastating one since their population isn't immunized.

China has a 87% COVID vaccination rate, which is higher than the US (79%). However, the Chinese-made vaccines are not very effective, and many of the unvaccinated are elderly. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1279024/china-coronaviru... vaccination-rate/

They also have "only" 30k official deaths.

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#88
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sperm concentration of the COVID-19 negative group was significantly higher than those in the COVID-19 positive group. No statistically significant difference was detected between the groups for sperm motility and morphology. It was observed that men with COVID-19 had decreased sperm concentrations suggesting that COVID-19 may have a negative effect on male fertility. However, in the long term, more comprehensi…

Given what I know about the modern man in general (being one, being around them), it's possible that more healthy men do not catch covid and also have higher sperm counts to begin with. Not sure if the study took that into account.

> it's possible that more healthy men do not catch covid

I'm pretty certain that that is not true. There is no study I've seen that correlates (either positive or negative) susceptibility to COVID with general health.

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#89
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand. How does "lab-leak vs non-lab-leak" relate to this?

If it's a lab-leak it means the virus was potentially well studied before the leak, and it's effects known. Therefore the government could know a lot more about it than they claim.

Don't you think that what they know about the virus is part of public research? What could be hidden there? Side question: could you include a timer in a virus to launch again a date?

Re: China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

#90
post #72

A common story you hear is that Chinese vaccines are less effective and that they also do not want to rely on Western vaccines in turn. What I don't quite understand is why they couldn't just create some joint venture with a Western pharma company and then supply a rebranded version of the mRNA vaccines to their population. I would think they have the propaganda tools at hand to make such a move palatable even to the…

I came across a recommendation for The Economist's podcast The Prince here on HN, and can say it's a great primer on the modern calculus of Chinese leadership.
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