WHO: China's zero-COVID strategy not sustainable, gets censored

The head of the World Health Organization said Tuesday that China’s zero-tolerance approach to COVID-19 was “unsustainable.”

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s rare public criticism of China’s “zero-COVID” policy comes as its largest city, Shanghai, enters its sixth week of harsh lockdowns.

"When we talk about the zero COVID strategy, we don't think that it is sustainable considering the behaviour of the virus and what we now anticipate in the future," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters on Tuesday.

"We have discussed this issue with Chinese experts. And we indicated that the approach will not be sustainable... I think a shift would be very important."

The WHO also said COVID policy must be balanced against the population’s human rights.

"We have always said as WHO that we need to balance the control measures against the impact they have on society, the impact they have on the economy, and that's not always an easy calibration," said WHO emergencies director Mike Ryan at the press briefing.

Shanghai’s 26 million residents have been restricted to their residential complexes for over a month now and have complained on social media about food shortages and COVID-positive children being separated from their parents.

Officials in the capitol city of Beijing have also asked businesses to close and workers to work from home but have avoided using the term “lockdown.”

Logistics experts have warned that the supply chain impacts of these lockdowns will be “worse than Wuhan.”

A clip of Tedros’ comments was widely shared on the WeChat microblogging platform until it was reportedly scrubbed from the by Chinese censors, according to VICE.

State run media did not acknowledge the WHO comments on Wednesday, though a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry called for Tedros to avoid making what he called “irresponsible comments,” reports The Wall Street Journal.

Shanghai officials insist that the lockdown policies, now called "dynamic zero," will continue and are achievable.