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The political show to boost vaccination rate |Lau Sai-leung

蘋果日報 2021/06/02 09:07


Professor Lam Tai-hing of the School of Public Health, the University of Hong Kong, has commented on the rate of vaccination against COVID-19 in Hong Kong, which is one of the lowest in the world at merely 20.5%. Given the convenience of getting a jab in the city, Lam said that Hong Kong people should feel ashamed about the low vaccination rate and their failure to contribute to herd immunity in Hong Kong and the world. Lam is an enabler of the Carrie Lam inoculation-boosting project. However, by blaming the citizens, he has performed a truly ugly act. As everybody knows, Carrie Lam’s popularity as a leader must be one of the lowest in the world. She has long lost the trust of Hong Kong people and should have stepped down. She is clinging to power simply by implementing far-left policies to curry the favor of the CCP to seek a second term in office. How can a politician like her make the public obey a government policy of their own accord? Carrie Lam is the primary culprit to blame for the failure of Hong Kong’s vaccine policy.
Last week the government began an all-out effort to salvage the failed vaccine policy. In addition to Lam Tai-hing’s criticism of Hong Kong people, the government also adopted a carrot-and-stick policy. It went with incentives, as the government and the private sector are “joining forces” to boost inoculation. The “stick” is punishment for those who do not get vaccinated. Carrie Lam has said that vaccination will be an “essential requirement” for future travels and visits to mainland China, so it is impossible not to get vaccinated. As for the “carrot”, the government has mobilized a property developer to donate a residential unit in a prize draw for citizens who have got the shot. Chief Secretary for Administration Matthew Cheung highly approved of the plan. Other prizes include air tickets and discounts on food. To put it simply, the inoculation-boosting campaign is also Carrie Lam’s reelection campaign, so everything must go off without a hitch. That’s why after the press conference Carrie Lam “earnestly requested” the media to have Hong Kong’s interests in mind, saying “I hope friends in the media will cover the story in a more comprehensive and objective manner so that Hong Kong can free itself from the pandemic situation as soon as possible.”

A discredited Carrie Lam’s kiss of death

Over the past two years or so, a discredited Chief Executive has turned good policies into bad ones, and bad policies into crises. Vaccination is not uncontroversial itself. However, to return life to normal, Western countries have achieved satisfactory vaccination rates even though there are no campaigns to boost inoculation. For this is a normal response. In the US, nearly 40% of people have received two doses, and half of the total population have received at least one dose. In the UK, 32% of the population are fully vaccinated, while 55% have received at least one dose. A democratically elected government protects the rights of individuals. It is difficult to “punish” those who refuse to get vaccinated, so a democratically elected government can only depend on well-known figures and political leaders to urge them to do so. Carrie Lam still blames the low vaccination rate on one-sided media reports, so she “earnestly requested” the media not to be harsh but report the inoculation-boosting campaign in a positive light. But Carrie Lam is the real problem. In an opinion poll, 40% of respondents gave her a score of zero, and 70% thought that she was unfit to be Chief Executive. She used RTHK, a public broadcaster, to promote propaganda about a new electoral system that eliminates opposition. The program got zero ratings. The reason? No one wants to see her on TV. No one wants to listen to her.
What a normal person will do facing such a situation is to step aside in favor of an expert. An unpopular politician should not try to steal the limelight, because that is counterproductive. What is strange about Hong Kong politics is that as Yuen Kwok-yung and Chuang Shuk-kwan, both of them experts, are stepping further and further aside, Carrie Lam is increasingly taking center stage. After all, as the “election” is approaching, it is time for Carrie Lam to put on a political show to prove to the leader of the central government that she does not shy away from difficult tasks in favor of easy ones. If her campaign backfires, she can easily shift the blame on the press. Under the CCP’s direct rule, the bureaucratic style of governance of mainland China has made its way into Hong Kong. To suit the preference of the CCP, the Chief Executive finds it necessary to show that she is directly responsible for planning and leading the fight against the pandemic.
Now who says that political shows are the preserve of democratic elections? A political show in a dictatorship is only more sickening.
(Lau Sai-leung, political commentator)
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