It’s one thing for China to perform worse than the United States or Western European countries. But Russia?
For a long while, I’ve been open to the idea that a laboratory leak best explains the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. It’s something of an Occam’s Razor approach; the notion that a novel coronavirus genetically similar to the one found in horseshoe bats naturally appeared in close proximity to not one but two laboratories researching novel coronaviruses found in bats, and had no connection to either of those labs, would be an astounding coincidence.
That is distinct from the idea that this is a “plandemic,” that the virus represents a engineered bioweapon, or that the virus was deliberately released. For starters, the rulers in Beijing may not care much about the well-being of the average Chinese citizen, but they do care about economic growth, and the pandemic inflicted serious damage to China’s economy. Yes, the country recovered well enough to be the only major economy on earth that experienced growth in 2020 — but that was the weakest growth in decades. China’s economy would have been much better off without the pandemic.
Also, if this was some Chinese bioweapon, then Chinese medical researchers should have been way ahead of the rest of the world in the development of a vaccine. Instead, the Chinese effort is a flop, particularly compared with the U.S. and its allies. The Chinese Sinovac vaccine appears to be only slightly better assembled than that chintzy furniture you ordered that arrived with parts missing and no instructions in English. A Brazilian study calculated the Sinovac vaccine’s effectiveness as slightly better than a coin-flip, working in 50.4 percent of cases. Somehow, this is less than shocking after all of the reports of China exporting more than 10 million pieces of defective personal protective equipment.
It’s one thing for China to perform worse than the United States or Western European countries. But it’s not even doing better than Russia. Yes, even the country of accidental anthrax leaks, exploding smallpox labs, and Chernobyl nuclear-management response has managed to develop a highly effective coronavirus vaccine. A new study in The Lancet concludes the Sputnik 5 vaccine has “91.6 percent efficacy against COVID-19 and was well tolerated in a large cohort.”
Of course, because this is Russia, the vaccine was approved in August of last year, and independent effectiveness and safety testing were only completed now. As Yakov Smirnov would say, “in Russia, safety tests you.”