Shanghai Flexes Its Medical Dictatorship – But Why Now?

By Jefferey Jaxen

While politicians in most country’s are racing to end Covid restrictions just in time for voting season, China doesn’t seem too concerned with their people’s feelings, or humanity.  

The world is watching perhaps the deepest, most authoritarian Covid lockdown response since the start of the pandemic – and that is saying a lot. 

Videos are emerging daily of children taken away from their parents to quarantine facilities, robot patrol dogs, dystopian drones barking orders, food riots and public health officials killing the dogs and cats of people who tested positive and taken to facilities.

The stuff nightmares are made of.

Shanghai is China’s most-populous city as well as one of the world’s largest seaports and a major industrial and commercial centre of China.

So after the world has witnessed and painfully experienced two years of abject failures from strict Covid lockdown responses from governments around the world – why are Chinese authorities trying it again? And why now? 

We are being told that both Omicron and its newest BA.2 subvariant are both non-starters as far as lethality or their ability to cause widespread serious illness. Yet China’s leaders have committed to delusional levels of Covid medical authoritarianism, in full view of the world, to fight such a mild enemy with proven inferior weapons.

Hard lockdowns are an embarrassment, political suicide for those who commit to them and medically impotent public health measures. They’ve turned so unpopular that even one of the most adamant cheerleaders, Dr. Fauci, has backtracked and admitted their failures and collateral damage.

Chinese leaders have ground Shanghai’s economic engine to a halt, a strategic blunder only to be amplified by the massive geopolitical movements happening through the Russia–Ukraine conflict  – together major suppliers of wheat and fertilizer.

The headlines have been nothing short of horrific coming out of Shanghai – trying to appear ‘objective’ is no longer an attribute. 

Shanghai placed a two-stage, citywide lockdown starting on March 28, 2020. The hard lockdown has been in effect since then. City health officials have ordered regular testing of its 25 million plus residents on a regular, ongoing basis.   

National Review reports, “On Saturday, the city reported about 23,000 cases, most of them asymptomatic, according to the Associated Press. China has enforced a “zero-Covid” policy since the pandemic first began more than two years ago.”

Despite the Covid PCR tests being known from virtually the beginning of the pandemic response over two years ago to be highly inaccurate and have a large propensity to deliver false positives, China apparently doesn’t care. 

“On Thursday, the [Chinese] Government reported 23,107 new cases nationwide, all but 1,323 of whom had no symptoms. That included 19,989 in Shanghai, where only 329 had symptoms.” reported the Associated Press. 

Dr. David Livermore at the Daily Sceptic writes “This equates to only 5.7% of ‘cases’ identified nationally being symptomatic, and only 1.6% in Shanghai. Such tiny proportions are far below the international norm, where 25-75% of identified cases typically are symptomatic. They do, however, tally with the fact that Shanghai is repeatedly testing its entire 25 million population. Used 25 million times, a test with 99.9% specificity will throw up 25,000 false positives.” 

The U.S. has just ordered the departure of non-emergency employees and their families “due to a surge in Covid-19 cases and the impact of restrictions related to (China’s) response,” according to a statement. In response, a Chinese ministry spokesperson defended the country’s Covid prevention and control policies as “scientific and effective.”

For mostly asymptomatic cases of a non-lethal strain of coronavirus apparently going through a population that we are told is well into natural immunity and vaccinated, China is killing its economy and causing massive harm to its people via unscientific lockdowns. 

While even the lesser medical dictator wannabes in New Zealand and Australia have been forced to drop their ‘zero-Covid’ policies, China still foolishly continues with it. Why? 

A myopic impulse to always choose humanitarian crushing tactics and top-down state edicts by force over individual choice or medical autonomy? 

An attempt to obfuscate the supply chain slowdown and food crises issues kicked off by two years of global Covid restrictions and now being amplified by the Russia-Ukraine war?

A knowing of an approaching, more deadly mutation?

To provide cover for the population-wide unfurling of vaccine harms and/or antibody dependent enhancement from the country’s Covid vaccine campaign.   

Or something perhaps worse? An early leap deep into the WEF-themed ‘global reset’ agenda? One in which other countries don’t have the political will to do and whose populations, at this stage of awakening, would oppose with all their might.  

Regardless of the reasoning, the optics on the global stage for China are terrible. 

However, it’s interesting to note that despite the human atrocities directly caused by the Chinese government lockdown restrictions, the World Health Organization is sitting quietly on the sidelines.

Dr. Alejandro Cravioto, chair of WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization, said it “would be important” to see whether such lockdowns are fully effective in containing the latest outbreak…

A 2020 breakdown of the top contributors to the World Health Organization shows China at the top with $28.7M.