No, North Korea did not “manage” COVID. It piled famine on plague.

The editors of 38 North are smart, well-informed people, and so I’m puzzled by their decision to publish this submission by Heeje Lee and Samuel S. Han, a dentist and a research assistant, declaring Kim Jong-un’s victory over COVID. Unlike the usual suspects, Lee and Han don’t avoid all criticism of the North Korean system, its leaders, or its policies. They acknowledge “the weak state of the country’s health care system,” concede its widespread malnutrition, and lack of a COVID vaccination program. But their risible claim that Pyongyang “stabilized the recent outbreak in record time with minimal deaths, at least according to the official government narrative” is … certainly a take. On what basis do they contend this when so many credible sources say otherwise? By relying almost exclusively on North Korean state media—their only footnote cites the Rodong Sinmun!

There is little available data that accurately portrays the current COVID-19 situation of North Korea. In fact, the only source is the national reports that are published daily by the government-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

But there are plenty of independent and credible sources, and we’re about to review what they tell us. There would be more if Kim Jong-un hadn’t kicked out all but three foreign aid workers and repeatedly rejected offers of food and medical aid. And it should go without saying that no one should rely on KCNA for anything, except for how to run a ten-year con job on the Associated Press. Unfortunately, behind “the official government narrative,” Kim’s strategy hasn’t worked. Recent reports from inside North Korea still tell us that the pandemic is still raging, preying on the malnourished, the very old, and the very young especially. As recently as June, there were reports of malnourished children dying after experiencing COVID-like symptoms. Last week, the Daily NK reported that large numbers of people in Kilju County, where Kim Jong-un tests his nukes, were experiencing COVID-like symptoms. Kim Jong-un’s “treatment”—a blockade that’s causing untold misery and starvation—might be worse than the disease, and remains in place despite his claims of victory.

Things only get worse when the authors try to explain the “success” of Kim Jong-un’s “stewardship.”

They declared a national emergency immediately after the first confirmed COVID-19 case, 

That’s almost certainly false. North Korea began 2020 with a neglected, underfunded, and dilapidated public health system, and a sick and hungry population. For all of these reasons, North Korea was exceptionally vulnerable to a pandemic. Its government didn’t admit to its first COVID case until May of 2022. But as Lina Yoon of Human Rights Watch wrote last year, despite the state’s claims of “no recorded COVID-19 infections,” “media outlets with sources inside North Korea reported accounts of COVID-like symptoms and deaths among soldiers, and possible outbreaks in the northern cities of Manpo and Chongjin.” Amnesty International isn’t buying the state’s belated admission of the pandemic’s arrival, either, noting the “unofficial sources who reported high numbers of infections and deaths, and cremations taking place before the cause of death could be determined.”

ordered a nationwide lockdown, 

That lockdown is enforced by shoot-on-sight orders at the border, which the authors did not mention. Kim first imposed the blockade in January 2020. The shoot-on-sight orders came to light later that year. According to a UN Special Rapporteur, “Draconian measures have further strengthened the State’s control over the population, such as the policy of shooting individuals who attempt to enter or leave the country.” And as Human Rights Watch, the Daily NK, and Rimjin-gang have repeatedly told us, that blockade has caused untold suffering, starvation, and death on a scale we haven’t observed since the Great Famine. People are begging on the streets. Children collapse from hunger. There has been a surge in back-alley abortionsPeople starve in their homes until the authorities come around to gather and cremate them. Bodies of women, children, and babies float downstream from North Korea to South Korea—one of them still wearing her Kim Il-sung pin. Food insecurity affects more than 60 percent of the people, according to one estimate. The complete, state-imposed isolation and secrecy don’t even allow us to know where, which, or how many people are starving, except that the poor suffer the most. A UN Special Rapporteur has called for the blockade to be lifted.

If the blockade isn’t an effective pandemic control measure, why impose it? Another Human Rights Watch scholar, John Sifton, sees it as “a pretext to further entrench totalitarian rule and keep North Koreans isolated from the rest of the world.” Yoon also suspects that the blockade “may even be an attempt to return to ultra-strict controls in past decades, when the government controlled all information and the distribution of food and materials, while prohibiting ‘free market’ activities.” Satellite images today show a dramatic decrease in market activity. Poor North Koreans depend on markets to supplement state rations that are rarely enough to live on. Kim may be trying to roll the clock back to the 1990s, when a discriminatory, corrupt, and inefficient rationing system allowed millions to starve to death. Now, Kim is spreading the pseudoscientific nonsense that dissidents based in South Korea introduced COVID through leaflets, in an apparent pretext for extraterritorial censorship or acts of war. 

We’re due, after all.

and delivered medicine and food to houses 

No, they didn’t. Outside the privileged capital, most people get no distributions of medicine and often, can’t even buy it in the markets. Days before Kim Jong-un declared victory over COVID, the state declared that it would execute anyone selling medicine on the black market. The medicine that the state does deliver can be unsafe. In some cases, the state distributed medicines for the use of adults to children, which killed them. Patients also die because they lack instructions about how to take the medicines.

while promoting the production of domestic medicine. 

North Korea’s pharmaceutical industry produces first-rate counterfeit Viagra, and highly pure meth and heroin for the export market. For its poor, it makes herbal and folk medicines that don’t work: “eating honey when coughing,” “decoction of gold or silver figs or willow leaves.” Kim’s blockade has prevented imports of effective ones. He won’t accept U.S. our South Korean medicines. He only made a significant effort to import medical supplies to deal with the pandemic two and a half years after it began. Maybe in a moment of mercy, Kim decided to test one less missile to pay for them, probably for the elites in Pyongyang.

State media has also reported the case numbers and provided medical information about COVID-19 daily.

North Koreans know those numbers are fake. Local officials have almost no test kits and have no way of knowing who has COVID. Cases they suspect, they underreport because they’re afraid of being blamed and punished. Authorities cremate the bodies of suspected victims without establishing a cause of death or allowing the families to hold funerals. Poor North Koreans certainly don’t believe state statistics.

With limited geographic mobility and domestic migration even before the pandemic, North Korean society is set up in a way that makes controlling the transmission of this airborne virus easier than in most countries. 

Which is to say, North Korea’s totalitarian system allows it to enforce death by starvation instead of death by disease. 

In short, North Korea was able to quickly stop community spread through aggressive public health measures, and as such, has not experienced a catastrophic situation.

Eventually, the authors touch lightly on the question of vaccines.

Although the nation has a history of success in mass vaccinations, few, if any, COVID-19 vaccines are known to have been administered. 

Today, North Korea is one of just two countries on earth without a COVID vaccine program. The authors concede that Pyongyang refused (or ignored) offers of vaccines from AstraZeneca and China’s (less effective) Sinovac. They might also have mentioned Joe Biden. North Koreans who hear that South Koreans are vaccinated for COVID are often stunned to learn that the vaccine even exists. They cite one example of a successful vaccination campaign—a 2007 measles vaccination program that reached 3.3 million out of roughly 23 million North Koreans. The fact that the North Korean government just expelled teams of aid workers, including those who were trying to control a multi-decade outbreak of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, should cause us to question its “history of success.”

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And the authors’ conclusion? First, great job, North Korea! Second, that “the international community” should vault money over the DMZ for medical aid programs at North Korea, because after all, “its ideology of self-reliance prevents international cooperation,” presumably including monitors to make sure we aren’t doing what Medicins Sans Frontieres called “aid-dumping” in its epic memoir of its failed aid efforts during the Great Famine. That memoir—really, a compilation of contemporaneous emails, internal reports, and press reports—should be required reading for anyone recommending or making aid policy for North Korea. It tells the story of a state that, having learned decades ago to deceive and manipulate Soviet Bloc donors, found easy marks in European (and especially American) aid workers who were greedy to ingratiate themselves with Pyongyang and exceptionally naive about how they did so.

I’m more inclined to believe that these authors just didn’t do their research than believe they intentionally echoed the state’s propaganda and selectively disregarded everything that contradicted it. If only they’d spent a few minutes reading the outstanding and hard-hitting work of Human Rights Watch’s Lina Yoon, whose work has the advantage of listening to the North Korean people, or this well-researched commentary that calls North Korea’s response to the pandemic “a state-fueled tragedy.” Without clarity and truth, even the best intentions can do serious harm. For four decades, our refusal to face the real nature of the state in Pyongyang has prolonged North Korea’s humanitarian crisis. The risks of more outbreaks from new variants are rising. Now that we’ve all made a grim peace with the inevitability of more variants, any premature declaration of victory is sure to end as badly as it began. Just weeks ago, the World Health Organization warned that the pandemic in North Korea was likely going to get “worse, not better.” Even Pyongyang insists that despite its “victory,” the blockade at the border will remain, even if it ends up killing more North Koreans than the pandemic. Pyongyang’s declaration isn’t just transparent bullshit—forgive me for rephrasing the expert consensus—it’s dangerous bullshit that obstructs effective humanitarian and public health responses.

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Still, we can assign the authors to a different category than the usual suspects who are mostly or entirely silent about Kim Jong-un’s blockade, but decry targeted counterproliferation sanctions for causing hunger and suffering, despite their many humanitarian safety valves—Christine Ahn, Kee Park, Henri Feron, Dan Jasper, or recently appointed State Department “senior advisor” Jessica Lee. Kee Park actually defends the blockade,  writing, “To its credit, this strategy of prioritizing the prevention of the virus from entering its borders seemed highly effective, with apparently no confirmed cases for over two years.”

Lee, whose responsibilities will now include explaining the State Department’s policies to Congress, blames sanctions (rather than the blockade, or Kim’s culpable misappropriation of resources, or attacks on private agriculture) for food shortages. She has criticized State Department visa restrictions on travel to North Korea, whose government has a tendency to take aid workers hostage. She omits to mention that aid workers are eligible for exemptions to the policy, and that NGOs can easily avoid the restriction by hiring non-U.S. employees. She offers token criticism of Kim’s expulsion of aid workers, rejection of food aid and vaccines, and a blockade that has almost completely stopped aid shipments. Whatever the regrettable effects of sanctions—the solution to which is targeted humanitarian aid for workers in sanctioned industries, but which Kim Jong-un refuses—the effects of the blockade are far greater.

Hypocrites, the lot of them. Kim Jong-un’s indiscriminate blockade not only prevented North Koreans from importing food, it prevented them from importing fertilizer, seed, and other materials they need to grow it. It has exacerbated North Korea’s long-standing food crisis profoundly, and its effects are felt most acutely by the country’s poorest people. When people repeatedly demand the lifting of targeted sanctions that inhibit the state’s proliferation, crimes against humanity, systematic kleptocracy, and militarization, while remaining silent about the state’s own indiscriminate blockade of people whose poverty it has enforced for generation after generation, it’s fair to assume that these critics aren’t motivated a sincere interest in peace or the welfare of the people. 

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