> Their vaccine (sinovac) didn’t work very well… there was no point mandating it.
Okay…? How does this address my question about alternative vaccines? Including the fact that the PRC had a local company with an mRNA vaccine license? Was there scientific reasons for this? Lack of industrial ability and know-how? National pride?
Again, I do not have answers for these questions. But I keep being told that the government in Beijing is competent and that its actions were inevitable. To me, it stinks to high heaven and I believe mistakes were made (just like most governments did during the pandemic, like Boris Johnson stating that the NHS was well prepared in January 2020), but that there is an unwillingness to admit this and we get platitudes like “they had no choice”.
> Despite what you may have read Sweden also limited people’s movement and gathering and did localised lockdowns.
And were any of these actions even remotely like what we saw in the PRC? A cat and a lion both qualify as “cats” (felidae), but if you tell me I will share my room with a cat and I end up with a lion I think you will agree that I have both a right to complain and be somewhat surprised. Sweden to the best of my knowledge had government recommendations issued (at least I know that this was the case in Japan), with no criminal prosecution in the case of breaches. Are you really in good faith arguing that what we saw in the PRC was in any way comparable?
> What other technique do you think is available to stop a contagion spreading? You limit people’s proximity or their susceptibility … that’s it. That’s the whole tool belt, you don’t need to be an expert, just intuitively it’s easy to understand.
No, I do not believe that the set of tools is as limited as you seem to believe and nor do I believe that you have showed this to be the case. On the contrary, the range of approaches we saw across the world over the last three years speaks in my favour.