Beijing’s Zero-COVID Crackdown Not Likely to Work: White House COVID-19 Coordinator

A child receives a swab test for COVID-19 in a compound during a lockdown in Pudong district in Shanghai, China on April 17, 2022. Liu Jin/AFP via Getty Images

The harsh treatment of Chinese citizens in the name of extinguishing COVID-19 isn’t likely to succeed, the coordinator of the White House’s COVID-19 team said.

“We don’t think that a zero-COVID strategy, what China is pursuing, is one that is likely to work,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who recently joined the administration, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities have been imposing lockdowns in various cities in recent weeks, including Shanghai, in the name of combating COVID-19. That has left many without food and medicine, among other consequences.

“I think it’s very difficult at this point, with a highly contagious variant, to be able to curtail this through lockdowns alone,” Jha said.

His comments appear to be the first from a Biden administration official on the situation in China.

Jha, who is on leave from being dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, replaced Jeffrey Zients as coordinator of the White House’s COVID-19 team.

Jha, who didn’t remark on China during appearances on other Sunday shows, said the Biden administration’s strategy is aimed at getting people vaccinated and boosted in addition to providing access to treatments for those who do contract SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

“That is a much more effective, long-term, durable strategy for living with this virus,” he said.

Omicron, a variant of the virus, became the dominant strain in many countries in 2021. Omicron is better able than earlier variants to bypass protection from vaccines and prior infection. The vaccines are able to provide little protection against infection from Omicron but have held up better against severe illness.

BA.2, a subvariant of Omicron, has been circulating in China and the United States in recent weeks. Early indications are that BA.2 is more transmissible, but that it doesn’t cause more severe disease, Jha said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Jha spoke shortly after Zhang Wenhong, a top Shanghai pandemic expert, predicted more people would be killed by the city’s lockdown than COVID-19.

“How long can the whole city be put on pause, and can we afford it? Everyone has nothing to eat or drink, there is no place to buy vegetables, and if you are sick, you can’t go to the hospital to see a doctor," Zhang said in a video widely shared on Chinese social media.

“Moreover, if hospitals don’t resume services, cancer patients cannot undergo chemotherapy and surgery, people infected with other diseases cannot be treated, and trauma patients cannot be cared for. In this case, I believe that patients who die from other diseases are far more than the COVID-19. So I think it’s reasonable to resume work, and everyone should return to normal life as soon as possible.”

Alex Wu contributed to this report.