Nov
28
2022
Early in the pandemic ‘getting Covid later’ versus getting it right away made sense. We didn’t know what we were dealing with. It was better to delay until there were treatments and vaccines, and better to preserve hospital capacity. But what mattered is what you did with that time.
The U.S. and U.K. developed functional vaccines and treatments. China’s Sinovac Coronavac vaccine barely worked against the ancestral Wuhan strain. Most of China remained immunologically naive to the virus, especially as it mutated. The only end game was Xi’s re-election at the 20th People’s Congress. China didn’t use the time to prepare itself.
