Jason LefkowitzThe looming COVID death toll in China is a massive failure of governance.
China could have had access to Western mRNA vaccines as early as 2021. They didn't get it, because they demanded that the vaccine manufacturers turn over the core production technology to them in order to get access to the Chinese market.
This is a common feature of Chinese industrial policy. If you want to sell your products there, you have to give them access to all the information Chinese companies would need to be able to knock off your products. In exchange for some money right now, you effectively train your own replacement. The polite euphemism for this is "technology transfer."
This demand was a huge problem for Pfizer and Moderna, because currently they're the only ones who know how to make mRNA vaccines, and it's generally accepted now that mRNA delivery is the future of vaccine development. Right now, they own that future.
(China's demand could have been sympathetic if they had been pushing Pfizer and Moderna to release this information into the public domain, which would have let anyone who wanted to use it. That, I could have gotten behind -- but that's not what they asked for. They wanted it to remain a monopoly. Just a monopoly that they could cut themselves in on.)
Both Pfizer and Moderna decided that the deal wasn't worth it, leaving China's citizens with only access to lower-performing, domestically produced vaccines. And so now a lot of people are going to die, unnecessarily.
The Chinese government decided that it was more important to try and get one more industrial advantage for itself than it was to use the time Zero COVID bought to get its people the best protection possible. It's not the only government that put business interests above its peoples' health -- that list is sadly quite long (and includes the United States). But it's disheartening every single time it happens.
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