Joshua M. Zimmerman

Opinion | Hong Kong’s Covid crisis: why it’s easy, but unfair, to blame Carrie Lam

The politicisation of Covid-19 is hardly unique to Hong Kong: Australia and Europe saw riots while, in the US, vaccine scepticism along partisan lines is rife

Small government in Hong Kong has meant a botched Covid response. But this same light touch ensures free markets and long-term prosperity are safeguarded

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Why you can trust SCMP

People rest after receiving the Sinovac vaccine at a vaccination centre set up in an MTR station in Hong Kong on March 11. Photo: EPA-EFE

Joshua M. Zimmerman

Published: 6:45am, 2 Apr 2022

Everybody is criticising Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and her government’s Covid-19 performance: business leaders, the media, even Beijing loyalists. So it is hard to suppress the contrarian impulse to find ways of defending Hong Kong’s handling of this crisis.

I am not going to pat the government on the back. But I will point out that there is plenty of blame to go around, much of the criticism is weak, and there may even be some hidden upside.

Let’s start with the victims. If you really believe in personal agency, then our unvaccinated seniors are far and away the group most responsible for Hong Kong’s horrifying Covid-19 fatality rate.

Courtesy of the government, seniors enjoyed a year’s access to free vaccines. Robust data about Covid-19’s dire threat to the aged, as well as the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, was widely available. Yet the vast majority chose not to protect themselves in time. Were many seniors too frail or impaired to act? Absolutely, which is why families and doctors share culpability.

Better government messaging and outreach would have pushed the vaccination rate higher, but vaccine scepticism runs pretty deep here. I doubt the government could have done anything to get the vaccination rate high enough to have forestalled a significant Omicron death surge – something most major global cities experienced.

Exactly how far would you have gone to get that death rate down to near zero? Even if utilitarian calculations told us it was worth dragging octogenarians out of their beds to hold them down and forcibly inject drugs into their arms, most people would shrink from such well-intentioned brutality.