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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> China got back to productivity faster though, and gave their population time for a vaccine to be developed and distributed.

Wasn't China famously locked down long past the point where the rest of the world was back up and getting on with life? By the time we got to Omicron the vaccine appeared to be doing next to nothing and China was still locked down.

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China was not locked down for two years, no. A lockdown is not "Any pandemic restrictions at all", it's "You are not allowed to leave your house except for food and testing." They did not have the latter for two straight years.

> By the time we got to Omicron the vaccine appeared to be doing next to nothing and China was still locked down.

It’s funny you say that. China disallowed their citizens from using western vaccines including Pfizer, Moderna and Astra Zeneca. Chinese citizens were only allowed to receive Chinese made vaccines. For all we know, they needed their lockdowns until so late because their own vaccines lacked efficacy in baseline protection.

Both. China was both business as the new normal early on, but also stuck with the new normal far harder and longer than anyone else.

The vaccine was never doing "next to nothing" it was always very effective at keeping you from dying a suffocating death. That's one of the three big things vaccines are supposed to do -- prevent infection, prevent transmission, and reduce pathology. The conspiracy propaganda tried to make it seem like a vaccine that allows a mild case is a failure, when that is, in fact, a success.

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