Chinese ‘Covid cures’ have blighted billions
The first country to experience Covid-19, and the one that invented the defence strategy known as lockdown, is the only country still practising it.
The first country to experience Covid-19, and the one that invented the defence strategy known as lockdown, is the only country still practising it. But the Chinese form is so much harsher than the British version, it is almost misleading to use the same term.
In Shanghai, the biggest city now enduring the experience, millions have been physically barricaded into their homes, some crying out that they are starving. Those reporting infections are forced into vast quarantine camps. Vital office workers have been confined to their skyscrapers, sleeping at their desks for over a month now.
It is in starkest contrast to the rest of the world, which has moved to a policy of “living with Covid” – largely thanks to the remarkable success of vaccines produced by the US and the UK. But it is not just a natural appetite for ferocious social control by the Chinese Communist Party that has kept it wedded to what it calls a “zero Covid” policy. Its own vaccines, such as Sinovac, are considerably less effective, especially against new Covid variants. They are better than no vaccine, but another problem is that the lowest take-up has been among the eldest, who are most vulnerable to the disease. About 40 per cent of Chinese over-80s are unvaccinated.
They are also – which is no coincidence – the section of the population most faithful to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Here is where things become strangely circular, and not in a good way. Although there is increasing suspicion in the West that the Covid-19 pandemic can be traced to a leak from the Wuhan Institute for Virology (home of the world’s largest collection of bat coronavirus samples), the most common alternative supposition is that it stemmed from the way bats, among other exotic critters such as sea horses and pangolins, are used in vast quantities by practitioners of TCM.
This view was expounded by the British prime minister in characteristic style 15 months ago: “Like the original plague which struck the Greeks, I seem to remember, in book one of the Iliad, it is a zoonotic disease. It originates from bats or pangolins, from the demented belief that if you grind up the scales of a pangolin you will somehow become more potent, or whatever it is that people believe.”
Boris Johnson did not use the words “traditional Chinese medicine” but still caused fury in Beijing, especially because President Xi Jinping has promoted TCM in his own country and for export as a “treasure of ancient Chinese science and the key to the treasure house of Chinese civilisation”. The state-owned English-language newspaper Global Times quoted a chief physician at a hospital affiliated to the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, to the effect that Johnson was “shifting the blame to traditional Chinese medicine” in an “effort to divert public attention” from what it described as Britain’s failure to “contain the virus”.
Since then Chinese companies have developed what they claim to be effective TCM treatments for Covid-19 (not made from crushed bats or pangolins, but herbal in nature). The most comprehensive review of the academic literature on these remedies, by three Britain-based medics (Yangzihan Wang, Trisha Greenhalgh and Jon Wardle) in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, concluded: “Of 607 articles identified, 13 primary studies met our final inclusion criteria. No study convincingly demonstrated a statistically significant impact on change in disease severity.”
This verdict has made no difference to the vast sums of money to be made in China both by the manufacturers of these “remedies” and by those speculating on the shares of such businesses, which have soared on Chinese stock exchanges in the wake of successive outbreaks of the virus in Hong Kong and more recently, once again, on the mainland.
Last week the Financial Times published an eye-opening investigation under the headline “China Covid-19 tsar pushed treatments without revealing business ties”. This revealed that Zhong Nanshan, head of an expert group at the National Health Commission, the body charged with the official recommendations of Covid treatments, has close business links with firms producing TCM “Covid remedies”, including the treatment known as Xuebijing, a compound of various herbs. Without declaring those interests, Zhong co-authored a study which asserted that “conventional therapy combined with Xuebijing injection can significantly improve the clinical prognosis of patients with severe Covid-19”.
Another TCM Covid-19 remedy, Lianhua Qingwen (made of apricot kernels, licorice root and honeysuckle, among other things), was handed in quantity to Hong Kong when it was hit by the Omicron variant. The territory’s Beijing-approved chief executive, Carrie Lam, declared “heartfelt gratitude” to Beijing for supplying the stuff, adding that it “may have better effect than western medicine”.
In fact, because older Hong Kong Chinese were even less vaccinated than those on the mainland (65 per cent of its over-80s were un-jabbed, compared with just 6 per cent in Singapore), the death rate from the March Omicron outbreak was the highest recorded anywhere in the world since the outbreak of Covid in 2019. At one point almost 300 a day were dying from Covid. That may not seem colossal, but if the same rate were applied to the Chinese mainland, you would be looking at almost 60,000 deaths a day.
Then you understand why the lockdowns being applied by the authorities are so inhumane in their ferocity (for example causing a woman in labour to lose her child after she was denied entry to hospital because her negative Covid test was “four hours too old").
They are also central to the political survival of President Xi, who has staked his reputation on “zero Covid”. Xi has repeatedly trumpeted the genuinely impressive claim that China, the world’s most populous nation, has experienced fewer than 5,000 Covid deaths, compared with almost a million in the US. This intended proof of the superiority of the Chinese approach rests in part on manipulation of death rates: at a time when Shanghai had reported hundreds of thousands of infections, it still claimed there had been zero deaths from the outbreak. Associated Press quoted a city health official, on condition of anonymity, admitting that “the criteria for confirming cases and deaths are very strict and susceptible to political meddling”. No kidding.
The whole affair has shown the consequences of making medicine a nationalist – as opposed to national – endeavour. Thus the insistence on sticking with inferior Chinese vaccines and the refusal to license superior foreign ones. Thus, too, the otherwise incomprehensible persistence with Xi’s “treasure house of Chinese civilisation” – TCM – in treating Covid-19.
It’s still not known whether the bat and pangolin-grinders behind this vast industry are responsible for the original outbreak.
But this profoundly superstitious practice has left China with no defence against Covid other than mass incarceration.
The Times
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