China’s end to ‘zero-COVID’ has led to a deluge of misinformation: NPR

After nearly three years of strict “COVID zero” policies, Chinese officials have in recent days reversed most of them following rare protests across the country. Mass testing and mass quarantines are now a thing of the past.

Just as dramatic as the policy changes is the change in messaging coming from the public health experts the Chinese government has relied on since the virus was first identified in China in late 2019, putting their credibility at risk earlier. of what is likely to be a giant wave of infections

Two months ago, Dr. Liang Wannian, the architect of the zero COVID policy, said that China “cannot tolerate” a wave of mass infections. this month said“The virus is much milder now.”

If Liang was shifting focus toward less stringent protocols, another leading public health expert, Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a pulmonologist made famous fighting the SARS outbreak, made completely misleading claims about the virus. he left promoting China’s mass quarantine strategy in May to tell a state media output that has not seen cases of COVID-19 causing obvious long-term damage to organs.

Many studies have shown that COVID can cause chronic health problems, including Heart problems Y brain damage.

Zhong also said that 78% of patients infected with the Omnicron variant will not be infected again for quite some time. Studies suggest that protection against reinfection declines dramatically over time and most people will be reinfected every one to two years.

“Did Omicron mutate, or did the experts?”

The change of heart did not go unnoticed on the Chinese Internet. Publications juxtaposing Television appearances by various pundits before and after the state policy change, including Zhong and Liang, have garnered more than 100,000 views.

“Did Omicron mutate, or did the experts?” he wrote a poster.

Not all public health and medical experts have changed their minds. Zhang Wenhong, director of a Shanghai hospital affiliated with Fudan University, said the zero-COVID policy should be relaxed even before an outbreak in Shanghai shut down the city for weeks. That position initially drew some attacks online, though he is now being praised for speaking truth to power.

Wu Fan, a member of the Shanghai Disease Outbreak Containment Expert Commission, famous for insisting that Shanghai failed to close now receives online apologies.

Whiplash aside, much of the online discussion has focused on how to deal with the consequences of the policy change, including preventative measures and available treatments.

Unproven remedies

Unproven remedies to combat COVID have flourished again in recent days. An internal medicine doctor who is a member of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Engineering. recommended the unproven method of rinsing your mouth with ice-cold salt water every day. Online commenters were baffled. “Wasn’t the salt water rinse debunked two years ago? Does an ice cold version make a difference?” a wrote in a blog post.

A local government in southwest China He suggested prepare tea with orange peels and monk fruit, both common ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine, to prevent infections. Dr. Zhong said a few weeks ago that he has not found any medicine that is effective in preventing a COVID infection.

The chaos and uncertainty right now remind Chen Wenhong, an associate professor of media studies and sociology at the University of Texas, of the atmosphere in early 2020 when COVID was first spreading. “It’s like flying in the dark.”

information gap

For most people in China, state media and health professionals are the most trusted sources of information about COVID-19, according to surveys done in 2020. And with global internet access cut off for most, there are few alternatives to state media and its constellation of aligned social media accounts, says Huang Yanzhong, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

The private media could provide better information, although they do not have the same reach, he says.

In addition, non-state media are vulnerable to government crackdowns. Ding Xiangyuan was a well-read online health information outlet that debunked health myths and criticized the government’s promotion of TCM as well as the zero-COVID policy before it was discontinued of popular social media platforms in August. His accounts on the popular Chinese social networking site, Weibo, remain silent today.

Another challenge is that the Chinese media often translate misinformation about COVID from English-language sources and share it with their audience. “It does not matter if [the sources] reputable or not,” Huang says. “They find whatever they thought would be useful, they start translating it into Chinese, they start spreading it, and it goes viral.”

A recent example was how the Communist Party-controlled newspaper, The Global Times, cited a misleading report in the British tabloid, Daily Mail, which suggested without evidence that the vaccine maker Moderna made the virus. The Global Times widely cited the coverage and used it to attack other unsupported theories about the origin of the virus, including one that suggested it leaked from a government research lab in Wuhan. Other smaller social media accounts made videos of the report, putting “British Media” in the headlines.

Information from abroad comes not only from newspapers, but also from the millions of Chinese citizens living abroad.

“The Chinese diaspora has played a very helpful role here in sharing with people in China about their personal experience with COVID,” Chen says, “knowing that in most cases it won’t be that bad.”

She notes that while researchers and journalists often pay attention to social media discourse, many rural residents, often elderly, rely on television and their relatives in larger cities to stay informed. Many are vulnerable to disease, live in places where health care resources are scarce, and are not adept at finding information on social media.

With the disease rapidly cascading from big cities to towns and villages, the Chinese government must move quickly to deliver medically sound public health messages to the most vulnerable people, Chen says.

So far, both Chen and Huang say it’s too soon to say what effect the whiplash health messages will have.

Implications for the next pandemic

Abrupt changes in public health messaging are neither a new nor uniquely Chinese challenge. At various stages of the pandemic, many countries have changed course on which health messages to send. At first, there was a lot of back and forth about whether masks and face coverings would reduce the spread of the virus, including in the United States.

as npr reportedpublic health authorities do not fully base their messages to the public on science; many considerations also have a pragmatic and cultural basis.

Chen says that scientists have to do some soul-searching in the next two years. “If we know that politics is going to play a role in public health and also in science, how do we behave? [are] our ethics?

“When the next pandemic hits, what would be the best message?”

Michaeleen Doucleff and John Ruwitch contributed to this reporting.