What happened was the best case scenario. China has highly plausible deniability and was the first and possibly hardest hit victim of the whole pandemic. Further, there is virtually no way China has benefited from the pandemic in a way that would make a premeditated leak plausible. If this thing was China’s fault, it seems most likely that it was accidental.
Imagine if this thing had leaked out of Iran, Israel, or Russia with hardish proof. We’d potentially be looking at world war right now.
It’s possible that there were great intentions all around and the COVID leak was a horrible accident.
It’s also possible that a PRC agency or individual decided to take advantage of the situation and leak it to try and stick it to the United States as a geopolitical move.
I hope this isn’t true, but until we have additional evidence it would be impossible to rule this out entirely. Also the PRC needs to show that evidence to the world ASAP.
For some reason the media wants to call everyone that looks at the situation xenophobic and racist, which just leads me to believe there is more to the story.
Since that post was made, there has been widespread reporting that US intelligence agencies are quite sure that China's numbers regarding the infection have been fabricated and underreported by quite a large amount. [0]
Keep in mind that the Chinese government doesn't have to be pursuing a centralized disinformation campaign for it to occur. It would appear that at least a decent amount of the misinformation is occurring because local officials are covering up the extent of the damage from the party for fear of retaliation. In this case, its entirely plausible for large-scale cover-up to be occuring in China, without the national CCP driving it or even being aware of the extent that its occuring.
I understand why you would think this might be the case - but please consider the logistical difficulties of such a vast conspiracy.
There's over a billion people in China, with an extensive diaspora that keeps in touch with family back home. The world is connected, and we aren't living in 1929 anymore (Where your entire extended family could have starved to death, and you wouldn't hear about it for a decade.)
What exactly do you think is happening there? They've lifted the lockdowns - and if the virus were still circulating through the community, it should have infected tens of millions of people by now. Do you think that millions of people are getting sick and dying, and their overseas relatives, who are frequently in touch with them, don't know about it?
They've tried to suppress COVID information, when only thousands of people were infected in January, and... Everybody still knew about it.
Do you think they are somehow orders of magnitude more successful at doing so in September, while secretly having millions and tens of millions of cases?
Or is the more plausible explanation that they probably don't have millions and tens of millions of cases?
Or, alternatively, do you think that they only have tens and hundreds of thousands of cases (Few enough to suppress information on), and somehow, despite the lockdowns being lifted, they aren't ballooning into millions?
It’s extremely far-fetched, but I think the implication is either China engineered the virus or at least allowed it to spread, either because they already have a vaccine/treatment, or at least know they can control spread among their population better than other superpowers. Not to mention the power they wield by being the world’s supply chain.
I’m pretty sure the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan lab on accident, and here we are. CCP incompetence or apathy allowed it to spread worldwide. They were doing legitimate research there and the protocols simply failed this one time and here we are.
Viruses can escape labs. Happened in the U.K. too. The amount of cover-up and unwillingness of world leaders to really talk about the potential origin makes sense because they don’t want to create anti-Asian sentiments.
We are already seeing some of that recently (attacks on Asians by morons and racists). Trump was willing to stoke the flames. He called it the China Virus specifically because of this - I think he was pissed off that it happened given his anti-China rhetoric and that world leaders probably agreed not to probe into it too much and to keep distance from the theory to prevent racist hate attacks and violence (which was probably the right thing to do).
For China, well, can’t ever admit anything bad happened and all that with the authoritarian regime. So the motivation there is obvious.
To me this group of actions would make the most sense geopolitically, subject to new information.
Half of this very thread is saying that China intentionally released this virus? Let’s grant you that half of this thread is saying that China likely engineered Covid as a weapon (very arguable). Are you unable to distinguish that assertion from the assertion that the engineered weapon was intentionally deployed? I don’t understand why you’re conflating the two.
I ask myself whether the Chinese government knows more about the risks of a COVID infection and is therefore trying everything it can to stop it from spreading. Maybe the virus actually leaked and the chemists know something about the long term effects that they do not publicly disclose.
Like everything I think this is at least a half truth. COVID did happen but probably not intentionally. And then China (And a few other countries) saw it as a great excuse to try a few things out on the general population and see what they could get away with.
I’m trying to piece together how any of this makes sense.
The implication is that Covid was a biological weapon accidentally released? Wouldn’t this be a pretty idiotic biological weapon? An especially bad one for a heavily urbanized country to release? Not to mention the main outcome of this “weapon” would be hurt China’s top importers?
Not saying they did intentionally leak it, but for an example of what they’ve gained, look at what they’ve been doing in Hong Kong and the South China Seas under cover of COVID. They also were able to quickly rebound and start producing economically while the rest of the world was shut down. I think COVID has been a net positive for China from a strategic standpoint.
Interesting perspective from you, particularly as I'm at uni and my close friends circle is probably 75% Chinese. Two of those friends were back in China visiting in December 2019 and January 2020. One of them was in Shanghai and was there for only 2 days before he put the pieces together, realised something very bad was going on, and got the fuck out back to the country we're in.
Let me be clear: I don't think that China purposely infected anybody, or intentionally let the virus spread. As for the lab leak theory, it's plausible, but I don't think we'll ever know (thanks to the CCP), and the fact is it doesn't matter now.
What I do think is that the CCP, and the local Wuhan CCP officials in particular, tried to cover their own asses. That may have included literally keeping information from Poobear and the other top CCP brass, but the point is that I don't think it was intentionally bioterrorism so much as the CCP hierarchy utterly failing to look after its local population and that of wider China, to say nothing of the rest of the world.
Nor does one need to be a Trump fan (I'm certainly not and I don't even live in America) to think that this was wholly China's fault, or to think that China is still to this day lying and covering it up.
China isn't so much blamed for failing to 'stop COVID' as much as it is blamed for blatantly lying to the international community, misleading WHO officials (the very officials China planted there - look it up), continuing to mislead and deceive the international community and investigators, and just generally being abhorrent outside of COVID. See: China's pathetic response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's failure to even condemn it in mild terms; China's posturing with its military in the South China Sea and in territorial waters off Australia's coast, neither of which are places where China has legitimate claims to territory; China's behaviour in Hong Kong, which represent more lies (this time, lies directed towards England back in the '90s).
In short, the rest of the world thinks China is a jingoistic, self-obsessed, arrogant shithole that lies to its citizens, firewalls them off from the rest of the world, and generally does whatever China thinks is in China's best interest, with no regard to principles or moral underpinnings. In short, China is a morally bankrupt country that lies to its citizens and to the rest of the world, and seems to be increasingly aggressive militarily. COVID just happened to be the confluence of all those factors into something that fucked the rest of the globe over. And let me be clear: one could just as easily call America a morally bankrupt shithole, too, and they'd be right - but the fact is, America's moral bankruptcy has resulted in local wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. American incompetence has never fucked the entire world over like China just did.
And let's be clear: If a virus broke out in India and the Modi government sat on it, obfuscated it, gagged local doctors, refused to allow media to report on it etc., there'd be just as much condemnation towards India as there was/is towards China. The reason China gets so much hate is because it is a dishonest bully whose modern rise rests on how well it has stolen Western intellectual property over the past 30 years, and not because the rest of the world has something against the Chinese specifically. China is called bad because it's bad.
China figured it out and unleashed a global pandemic by opening the borders to not be a victim of day the CIA.
It’s possible it’s intentionally leaked but not by China
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