The Chinese government’s continued super-cautious approach to covid, at a time when vaccines are widely available and permanent eradication seems impossible, makes me worry that it has reasons to expect e.g. worse long-term effects from covid infection than the rest of the world currently expects.
There are a lot of bad reasons to have such expectations. China’s media spend two years speaking about how COVID-19 did a lot of damage in the West but didn’t in China because of the great CCP policy.
In authoritarian countries the elite are affected by the government propaganda as well.
I suppose, to secret knowledge about the origins of the virus) could still be ahead of the rest of the world in understanding its long-term effects
That’s not how things work. You don’t develop a good understanding of long-term effects by understanding the origin of the virus. Especially you don’t without a healthy scientific debate.
I expect you’re right, but can you elaborate? For the sake of discussion, suppose it was accidentally released but deliberately created. Couldn’t the ‘designers’ of such a virus have knowledge about its capacities that might elude outside researchers?
To understand the long-term impacts of a disease or drug you have to study what it does in humans. That’s why a lot of drugs that were promising to the developer of the drug don’t live up to their promises in clinical trials.
There’s information that you gain in the design of a drug that’s useful to know which questions to ask when you study the drug in humans, but clinical studies in humans are the most important source of information.
Given the pressures that exist in China to fudge numbers, any internal government statistics that the Chinese do have are likely not very trustworthy. Very smart people in the Chinese party know that.
There are a lot of bad reasons to have such expectations. China’s media spend two years speaking about how COVID-19 did a lot of damage in the West but didn’t in China because of the great CCP policy.
In authoritarian countries the elite are affected by the government propaganda as well.
That’s not how things work. You don’t develop a good understanding of long-term effects by understanding the origin of the virus. Especially you don’t without a healthy scientific debate.
I expect you’re right, but can you elaborate? For the sake of discussion, suppose it was accidentally released but deliberately created. Couldn’t the ‘designers’ of such a virus have knowledge about its capacities that might elude outside researchers?
To understand the long-term impacts of a disease or drug you have to study what it does in humans. That’s why a lot of drugs that were promising to the developer of the drug don’t live up to their promises in clinical trials.
There’s information that you gain in the design of a drug that’s useful to know which questions to ask when you study the drug in humans, but clinical studies in humans are the most important source of information.
Given the pressures that exist in China to fudge numbers, any internal government statistics that the Chinese do have are likely not very trustworthy. Very smart people in the Chinese party know that.