It’s sad how many people in China are suffering unnecessarily this week

China's health commissions are not providing information on fast-acting Omicron treatment options

View from China with an Austrian School of Economics Perspective

Not only are hundreds of millions of Chinese suffering splitting headaches, high fever and sore throats, but hundreds of millions more are suffering from the knowledge that they are probably next in line. While not all cases are this serious, this fear is justified: According to recent data shared in an internal meeting at Shanghai’s Zhongshan Hospital, the current Omicron outbreak has now reached an R0 of 22, meaning that on average each infected person infects 22 additional people.

This is an exceptionally high number. As a point of comparison, the alpha version of Covid-19 had an estimated R0 of 2-3.

The latest government storyline is that this is nothing more than a bad flu. While there may be some merit to this characterization, there seems to be little evidence on the ground that any of the traditional Chinese flu medicines (中成药) have any effect on it.

For treatment, while each provincial health commission in theory has its own set of recommendations, most seem quite similar: principally ibuprofen (布洛芬) and paracetamol (对乙酰氨基酚, also known as acetaminophen), which are of course just fever suppressants and not really treatments at all. As an example, the Shanghai health commission’s latest recommendations can be found here.

In addition to the fever suppressants, Shanghai’s health commission recommends looking for certain ingredients in OTC Chinese flu medicines, though it admits that patients suffering from Covid-19 should not expect to see any quick turnaround times from these.

A number of these ingredients are to be found in Lianhua Qingwen (连花清瘟), a product which in the past was heavily promoted by Zhong Nanshan, a well-known figure in the Chinese medical community on par with Anthony Fauci in the US. During the Shanghai lockdown in April and May of this year it was purchased by the government in large quantities and distributed for free to Shanghai residents. To our knowledge there are no clinical studies supporting its effectiveness against Covid-19.

For someone suffering from a high fever and a splitting headache, this does not sound very promising.

What is noticeably missing from these lists: there are no prescription medications on them, not even aspirin. Not only that, but there is not a single fast-acting medicine actually intended to treat the condition, i.e. to lessen its intensity and shorten its duration.

As a result, besides swallowing some ibuprofen (if they have any!) for the most part few people have any idea what to do about the headache and fever.

In many cities, delivery companies are operating with only 25% of their staff working. 75% are out sick. This is representative of the population at a whole. (In Beijing, word has it that new signups streaming in from the countryside can make 2,000 RMB or more a day!) Even many of the elderly isolating themselves at home have been infected. Not to mention all those people obsessed with N95 mask wearing and antiseptic spraying – most have also been infected. This is no doubt frustrating for them, but sometimes reality dispenses with all fantasies and wishful thinking. This is one of those times.

The reality is that China is suffering from one of the most overwhelming outbreaks of fever in living memory. In countless cities, 80% or more are infected. No, this is not government propaganda, as some Western pundits claim. Nor is this just people’s imagination. True, it’s not the deadly pandemic so many governments have been ranting about for years, but that doesn’t make it any less real. Nor are most of these people ‘asymptomatic’. As we have explained before, that is also government propaganda. Their definition of ‘asymptomatic’ is ridiculous.

The result is a mad scramble to obtain whatever is being promoted by government authorities. Ibuprofen and even Lianhua Qingwen are sold out in most pharmacies.

This is sad, because there is a vast amount of knowledge about treatment using readily available repurposed drugs which is missing from these government pronouncements. While China was obsessing over keeping Covid-19 OUT of China, billions of people outside China were busy accumulating knowledge about dealing with it. That knowledge is not being made use of.

Two of the most well documented treatments with repurposed drugs make use of (1) hydroxychloroquine (aka HCQ) in combination with zinc (羟氯喹加锌) and (2) ivermectin (伊维菌素).

To be clear, our intention here is NOT to recommend these treatments, but rather to point out that they exist, are readily available and might be worth considering.

Particularly with respect to the first treatment, this apparent paucity of knowledge is a bit bizarre, since it wasn’t always that way. On the contrary, in early 2020 HCQ (羟氯喹) was one of the earliest repurposed drugs promoted by the Chinese medical establishment to treat Covid-19.

Like aspirin, HCQ is in theory a prescription drug in China; however, it is considered a low risk medication and thus it is not hard to get an online prescription from Meituan. For example, it is frequently prescribed to treat arthritis (关节炎).

Ivermectin does not require a prescription and can be bought on Taobao – 100 6mg tablets cost approximately 11 RMB ($1.60) including shipping.

We know many people who have used these treatments, apparently with success. Can we assure readers that these treatments are the right treatment for them?

Certainly not.

What we can however say is that:

1) These treatments exist.
2) One of the earliest promoters of hydroxychloroquine / HCQ was the Shanghai government health commission, which specifically recommended the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 on March 17, 2020.
3) These treatments are very cheap and off-patent. For this reason, they face opposition from the pharmaceutical industry everywhere. The pharma industry understandably wishes to promote more expensive products.
4) They have well established treatment protocols.
5) There were massive efforts in most Western countries to suppress access to information about these treatments and suppress access to the treatments themselves.
6) These treatments are readily available in China. Ivermectin can be bought on Taobao; HCQ is best bought via Meituan (美团买药). Zinc can be bought via Meituan or from most pharmacies.
7) Hundreds of millions of people all around the world have used them to treat Covid-19, allegedly successfully.
8) All three have also been used as a prophylaxis to protect their users from contracting Covid-19.
9) Hundreds of studies of their use against Covid-19 have been conducted and published. Some of them are collected here and here.
10) Their use has been promoted by many groups of experts in countries all around the world, including China, India, France and the United States.
11) There are some claims that HCQ is more potent than ivermectin against the Omicron variant.  
12) All the above medicines are medicines which have been in use for decades and are considered extremely safe when used in the recommended dosages. HCQ is considered so safe that the US FDA says it can be safely used even by pregnant women. In China it is in wide use as a medication to help prevent early-term miscarriages.

At this point the Chinese health authorities have declared that in terms of health, each person must look out for himself. This applies here, as well. Whether or not these treatments are worth trying is something that each person can and must decide for himself.

Leading the way forward

Hundreds of millions of mainland residents are now either already sick, or faced with the prospect of getting sick sometime in the very near future, including some people like pregnant women who cannot take ibuprofen. Is it not sad that so few of them are aware of the possibility that one or more of the above treatments might help them?

Where does knowledge come from?

How do we decide what is the best course to follow? We make decisions based on – among other factors – knowledge, understood here in the broad sense of the ideas and opinions we hold to be true. But where does this knowledge come from?

There are four sources:

• First-hand experience (what I experience myself)

• Second-hand experience (what my family and friends report about their OWN direct experience)

• Third-hand reports with the stamp of authority (what the government, people licensed by the government and academic “experts” say + such claims which my friends and family repeat)

• Third-hand reports without the stamp of authority (for example, what people write in books + what random other people claim online)

To take a concrete example, let’s say you suspect you might have some kind of food allergy. You have noticed that every time you eat something made with wheat, you feel bad afterwards. This is first-hand experience.

Your best friend tells you that she has also had a similar feeling and felt much better after cutting wheat from her diet. This is second-hand experience.

Then you go to a doctor and he does some tests. The doctor tells you the tests say you are not allergic to gluten and thus not allergic to wheat. In almost all industrialized countries, a doctor is someone licensed by the government, so this is the third category.

You read a book about wheat sensitivity, in which the author claims that allergy tests do not cover the full range of issues connected with wheat consumption. This is the fourth kind of information source.

Whom should you believe? Yourself? Your best friend? The government representative? The book author?

If we look at the extremes, one extreme is that I only trust my own experience. I ignore all other claims and rely only on my own experiences and analysis.

The other extreme is that I don’t trust my own experience at all. I trust only the government licensed experts — i.e., in this case, the doctor and his tests — even if what they say completely contradicts my own direct experience. Many people vaguely imagine that such experts are somehow objective and only beholden to the pursuit of truth. This is a naïve perspective. It completely ignores the fact that most of these experts are completely dependent on continued government approval for their livelihood.

In this extreme scenario, I would theoretically continue to gorge myself on bread and pasta regardless of how bad my reaction is.

The reality for most of us is that we tend to land somewhere in the middle. We consider all four types of information, apply them to our lives and assess the results. Based on these results we modify our selections the next time around.

This natural feedback process can however be pre-empted by government mandates, which essentially restrict our choices. Central to such government mandates is the implicit idea that third-hand sources of information with the stamp of authority are superior and should outrank all the others.

But is this true? Is ‘expert’ input better than other sources such as first-hand experience? And even if so, who gets to decide which experts are to be believed?

In the comments section of one of our recent articles, one commentator made the following statement regarding the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19: “If there is no creditable [sic, i.e. credible] proof then those statements shouldn't be made.” (our italics)

But this begs the question: who is to say what is credible and what is not?

For whatever reason, he or she evidently did not find the evidence he looked at convincing. Fair enough. In that article we did provide links to a few collections of studies, but this is beside the point. Our goal was not to provide medical advice or to advocate specific studies, but rather to point out (a) the existence of this information, and (b) the existence of hundreds of millions of people who used these treatments, allegedly successfully. We are certainly not going to debate the merits of particular studies. Which information is the most accurate, which information is the most useful, that is not for us to say.

We also pointed out that first and/or second-hand experience was in any case the best guide.

Basically this commentator seems to be saying that if some group of experts does not agree with a particular opinion, then it should be suppressed. This is hardly a fringe opinion, so it’s worth bringing up. Plenty of people all around the world think along similar lines, including many of those in power. In other words, censorship should be applied. But by whom? Which particular group of experts should be awarded this power? Who is to decide which opinions to censor and which ones to permit to be broadcast?

Over the past three years, most of the world’s governments have vehemently espoused radical policies promoted by various “experts”, while simultaneously suppressing conflicting opinions. Unprecedented regulations were introduced which drastically changed the lives of millions. Millions of businesses were destroyed and economies shrank. Many people died who might otherwise still be living.

Perhaps the results might have been better if everyone had been permitted to work things out on their own?

As mentioned previously, this is in fact the latest health recommendation emanating from the Chinese government: “每个人都是自己健康的第一责任人” - i.e. "Everyone is primarily responsible for their own health." Given that it’s the current official policy, at least at this point this idea can hardly be qualified as radical.

During these same three years, people accused of failing to adhere to the opinions of various government-appointed experts were sometimes described as ‘science deniers’. But there is no ONE science. In fact, science cannot be ‘settled’ because science is not a static state of affairs; rather, it is a never-ending process of discovery, both for the ‘experts’ and for all of humanity.

One of the central tenets of the Austrian School of Economics is the superiority of decentralized decision-making and information gathering over what is achievable via central planning. The marketplaces for goods and ideas do an infinitely better job at making sense of reality than a small group of central planners. With respect to the marketplace for knowledge, the Austrian position is the one expounded by the Austrian economist and Nobel prize winner Friedrich August von Hayek in his seminal 1945 essay entitled “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, in which he makes precisely this case for the superiority of what later came to be called ‘swarm intelligence’.

Dealing with Covid-19 is an unequivocal case in point.