The China Syndrome

Will it be Deja Vu all over again?

I had not planned to post this holiday weekend, but from the East there arose such a clatter….. It wasn’t reindeer, but COVID exploding now in China, and the Communist dictatorship is of course doing everything in their power to downplay the crises. For three years the Zero COVID policy, a totalitarian exercise in hubris which was predictably doomed to failure, was psychologically supported by constant messaging from the government about how deadly the virus was. In the blink of an eye, under pressure from protests, the CCP relaxed most of their draconian quarantine policies and testing mandates, and began to tell the sheep that the virus really isn’t so bad after-all. The Chinese government is lying about their case numbers and deaths on a scale which makes it hard to comprehend how they could ever think that anyone would believe them. But that is really the point, they don’t need to worry whether they are believed or not. The State controls the message, and is saturating social media with fake posts describing how everyone is recovering just fine from this now suddenly harmless virus. What they can’t hide are the bodies piling up as crematoriums are inundated, and families are finding there is no way to transport their deceased relative from home, or even the hospital.

Let’s examine the nature of the problem facing the Chinese right now. They vaccinated their population with inferior homegrown vaccines for starters, refusing to utilize the better performing RNA vaccines from the West. Mr. Bourla would have been more than happy to mint another giant jackpot in Peking. A substantial proportion of the elderly there remain unvaccinated. Distrust of the government runs deep in China, especially among the elderly, perhaps with quite good reasons; based on a number of well known medical catastrophes due to governmental malfeasance. Three years of the Zero COVID shenanigans not only wrecked their economy, and much of the world’s supply chain, but has left almost the entire Chinese population with no natural immunity to the web of COVID variants which have saturated the rest of the world. While it’s true that the Omicron derivatives circulating now are milder than the original Wuhan virus, and Delta in particular; two things should be kept in mind. Some of the perception that the current viruses are milder is bound to be due to the accumulated wall of immunity from infection with multiple variants in addition to vaccines. The other unfortunate fact is that the current Omicron crowd are vastly more contagious and fast spreading than the original virus. We in the rest of the world experienced this one year ago as the original Omicron BA.1 ramped up here—yes it was milder, but it infected so many people, including the vaccinated, so quickly that the hospital system was over-run, and we had very many deaths.

One aspect of how this China Syndrome affects us should be obvious; there will be a large impact on China’s economic output when vast numbers of workers are too sick to work. The CCP government appears to have anticipated that, and has now gone so far as to say that infected people may go to work if asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic—a far cry from arresting people for breaking quarantine just a few weeks ago, and the most glaring admission of Zero COVID’s failure. It is also guaranteed to spread the virus most efficiently. Perhaps that’s the point—having lost the long game with COVID, maybe the plan now is to just let it rip and get it over as quickly as possible: burn the bodies, make sure any trouble makers disappear, declare victory and then pretend everything went according to plan. The other way the China situation might affect us is through COVID infecting 1.4 billion people, generating more viral replications going on than I care to think about. We know that persistent viral infection in immunocompromised people is felt to be an incubator of novel, widely divergent variants. The Chinese government admits to 1.25 million HIV patients as of 2018 (of course they are probably lying on the low side) and out of their enormous population there must be quite a few other immunocompromised people. I doubt that they go to the lengths to keep them alive that we do here, but still that’s got to be a big number. Factor in the vaccination of the populace with a subpar vaccine that will encourage viral replication in the setting of vaccine mediated evolutionary pressure, and I have to wonder at the potential boatload of new variants, some perhaps with very unpleasant characteristics. Will it be deja vu all over again? Final point on this: China is lying now about COVID, and they lied in the beginning about the early patterns of COVID transmission and the magnitude of the problem. While I have always kept an open mind about the two competing theories of COVID’s origin, one would have to be fairly gullible to not ask the question, “What ELSE are they lying about.” Also of note the CCP just changed the official definition of a COVID death. Now if you die from say acute renal failure, stroke, sepsis or multi-organ system failure from COVID they won’t count it. The timing is perfect—how come we never thought of that?

Let’s look now at the situation here in the US where the Pandemic is behind us. Below is the graph of NYC hospitalizations, showing the highest level since the downslope of the original Omicron wave last winter. Of course these are almost all “old” people, so no reason to get excited. Is it possible there is a plan here as well? Could the salutary effect of all this on the financial stability of Medicare and the Social Security Trust fund have caught the eye of our protectors in DC? (I’m told recent court cases imply you have to clearly announce sarcasm and comedy to avoid running afoul of the cancel crowd).

What is particularly concerning is the rapid expansion of a new variant in New York and other locations on the east coast. XBB.1.5 is a derivative of XBB, the variant which caused a recent major surge in Singapore, and to date the most immune evasive Omicron. This new variant has three unique mutations compared to XBB, and is showing the most rapid growth advantage, 160%, of any previous variants compared to BA.5. Laboratory confirmation of significant antibody escape even beyond XBB is still pending, but likely given the rapid rate of growth. The following graphic from the New York Health Department shows how rapidly XBB and its derivatives are expanding and supplanting the prior viral strains. They are likely to be a major contributor to NYC’s case and hospital surge. That’s speculation at this point, but what is not speculation is that they will rapidly spread throughout the country. (Note in the graph XBB represents all XBB variants.)

Bringing it closer to home, right into my little Colorado Mountain Town ski resort, here is a graph showing the dramatic rise in COVID RNA in the waste water over the last several weeks. The spike is nearing the level of the first Omicron wave, and still rising. This is the result of the confluence of the new, vaccine and natural immunity evading variants, colder weather and the holidays bringing people together indoors, and everybody wanting to party like it’s 1999. Masquerade parties are out this year of course and that’s too bad. That situation won’t be helped by the White House COVID Co-ordinator Ashish Jha saying this week that, “there isn’t any scientific evidence showing that masks work that much.” Whether that was a slip of the tongue, or a slip of the brain doesn’t matter, it’s just more incorrect and misleading information that can’t be reeled back in. It will rank up there with his comment about two arms, so two vaccines. (graph courtesy again of Gregg Craig)

Last thing on the agenda today is a large randomized study from the UK Health Service published in Lancet Dec.22, demonstrating that Molnupiravir in high risk patients had absolutely no effect on preventing hospitalization or death in the real world treatment of UK patients. At best it might have decreased the number of days the patients felt ill—but I’m skeptical of that since it was not a blinded study, and placebo effect could well account for that. Be prepared to discuss these findings if your doctor tries to prescribe it for you or a high risk family member. I think I will look into how much money was wasted on this basically useless medication, and some simple calculations regarding how many people were needlessly hospitalized and died, when a very efficacious medication Paxlovid was readily available and under prescribed—but that is for another day. My editor is already complaining about being forced to work on the holiday, a new contract with no sick days, and the meager ration of coal for her tiny fire in the office. It’s all a lot of Humbug.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah. Be sure to share this with other highly gifted intelligent people, or even with random politicians.