When?

For a real easing of restrictions, the political calendar and the public health calendar actually might match up rather well next spring and summer. That’s when there tend to be fewer respiratory illnesses. And we are at the beginning of a very important political season in China that starts now, with a new Politburo named by the end of this month, and continues through mid-March, when a new cabinet will be named to oversee government ministries. Trying to change direction significantly on public health in the middle of that would really be a challenge.

The other worry is that vaccination has really petered out here.

How so?

At the peak, a year ago, China was doing 20 million to 30 million vaccines a day, and now it’s a couple of million. A big chunk of the population has not had a vaccine in the past six months. And yet, with fewer than a million confirmed infections in the past three years, almost nobody has developed the antibodies from an illness, either. On top of that, China has refused to allow the import of foreign mRNA vaccines that have been proved in other countries to be far more effective than the older-technology Chinese vaccines.

So the result is that you have a mostly unprotected population. If they want to open up, at a minimum they need to do a lot of vaccination. But they face, as in many places in the West, very strong public resistance and skepticism of vaccination.

If the Chinese government can shut down cities and force people to be tested, can’t they force people to get vaccines?

Public opinion does count for something in China. And there is a lot of hesitancy about vaccines here. One reason is that China had a couple of scandals in the past decade preceding Covid involving routinely administered vaccines that were out of date or even contaminated. And that has produced a lingering suspicion.

On top of that, when China first introduced its Covid vaccines in late 2020, it told older adults to be careful about getting these new, initially experimental vaccines, which created considerable vaccine hesitancy among that group.

The city of Beijing a while back tried to start requiring that people be vaccinated in order to enter certain public venues. And they had to abandon the policy within a couple of days because of pushback from the general public.