WALTER DURANTY, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Chinese Zero Covid was always a lie.

The reality that the AP report papered over — and what virtually all Western media has missed as it swallowed CCP’s Covid narrative whole — is that China’s true Covid strategy wasn’t aimed at containing the virus; it was aimed at containing the narrative. “The Chinese CDC was told how it’s going to go,” a private intelligence analyst with knowledge of the data said. The source explains that the CCP’s methodology of choice is not to flatly deny data or take down reporting wholesale but simply “round the edges” off the story by obfuscating just enough to blunt any alternative narrative from forming.

This new inflection in the Zero Covid narrative, which claimed that Omicron reveals the “limits” of China’s approach, merely served to reinforce the idea that China had successfully contained Covid had up that point. In an article on the limits of Zero Covid in the Omicron era, the BBC credulously noted, “If you adjust for population size, there’s been around three deaths per million people in mainland China, compared with about 3,000 in the US and 2,400 in the UK.”

Even entertaining China’s absurd Zero Covid claims requires suspending basic human logic. Consider the case of Singapore, a country much richer and more advanced than China that was able to drive compliance at least as well. (Though considering the entire country is an urban island, in distinction to China’s vast rural expanses, probably much better.)

According to analyst George Calhoun, official Chinese data put China’s mortality rate 50 times lower than Singapore’s. South Korea — which has a single, permanently closed border which effectively makes it an island — is another standout for Covid success. Yet by Chinese official reporting, South Korea’s Covid mortality would be 73 times higher Covid-19 than China’s.

The story here isn’t that Chinese Communists lie but that American fellow travelers help them do it.