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.
There are two things actually and sadly no one investigate both of them:
1. Is Covid a lab leak ? (which had poor investigation)
2. Could China stop it (Whether its lab-leak or not) in early stages and prevent it from spreading out of their borders ? (which they achieved successfully for other provinces)
I think the Chinese government would have reacted like this even if it didn't know what they were dealing with, which still is the most likely explanation.
I think the general information control we saw around Covid far more concerning.
what does china govt know that rest of the world doesn't know about current spread of virus...??? Such extreme measures make me think we are missing something
Whenever I think about the situation in China it makes me wonder why the Chinese government is spending so much political capital to keep people from getting infected by such an incredibly transmissible disease. I had this idea that China was run by engineer types who were fairly rational.
From the initial denial that there was any disease at all, to later saying it wasn't transmissible between humans, to the obvious lies about the initial death toll, to now attempting to lock down more than any other country, I'm very curious what officials in China know about this particular disease that they aren't sharing with the rest of the world.
There's really no reason to care about which of the two prevailing theories are right, because they have the exact same outcome: Whether it came from the chinese lab or the chinese wet market, china will not let anyone know, and they have no intention of letting anyone else tell them how to prevent it in the future. We cannot make them run their bio labs safer, and we cannot force them to prevent a natural source without something stupid like extreme sanctions or war.
So instead, we could look at the ways we utterly fucked up when presented with a novel pathogen that we absolutely could have handled better. But oddly nobody who is so gung ho about punishing china for covid seems to want to look at that. Wonder why
I'm going to put my tin hat on here but if covid-19 was leaked from a Chinese lab due to error or whatever, the reason they're having such strict lockdown measures like in Shanghai make much more sense when you see papers being released regarding damage to the brain than if it was a regular virus leading to a flu - especially in highly vaccinated population centres. Assuming a lab leak they may well be aware of these effects already from previous research and therefore enforce zero-covid to avoid it because it's riskier than we currently understand.
This stems from my thoughts that it is fairly likely to be from a lab and that the lockdown measures of physically padlocking buildings to the point vaccinated people are starving in Shanghai for weeks is just incredibly OTT for what the risks are viewed as in the West.
I'm not sure it really a good example but the Chinese authorities who I'm guessing knew it was a lab leak went for a zero covid elimination strategy while the non Chinese governments were a bit like it's just the flu bro. I remember one of the top Chinese scientist saying if other countries had followed their policies the whole thing could have been stopped in a few months. I think if it had been announced it was a lab virus and nasty the non Chinese politicians may have followed the Chinese policies. But who knows.
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.
If China did leak COVID, as is looking more and more likely, by accident or on purpose, that is a POLITICAL issues.
First if it was a leak, we'd have to cut off all funding and shared resources just to be safe, which we have already done.
Next there would have to be some investigation that China would naturally be adversarial to. If it was natural they would want to collaborate (they are refusing to collaborate for the most part).
Virus is of zoonotic origin, not from some weird gain of function experiment that leaked. Period. The real problem is that the Chinese government (who I don't like very much) have such an ingrained culture of secrecy and censorship that prevented vital information from getting out that was the cause of the pandemic. Had we known by November 2019 it could spread through the air we might have stopped this in its track much earlier and saved millions of lives.
I believe that if a regime shares information that is at face value negative for that regime that we can believe them in so far as that aspect is concerned. China has shared a lot of information around the pandemic that can be classed as 'draconian countermeasures', but they do seem to have the COVID situation under control.
If you want to argue the opposite then you should substantiate that with data and sources, rather than just with claims left hanging without support.
I'm sure there is going to be some discrepancy between the facts and what we get from official communications but at this point in time there are very few governments left that have been 100% transparent during this whole saga. China likely is no exception to that but I would not expect them a-priori to be worse than say Russia or some of the countries of the EU.
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.
It might just be good practice for them, as they expect something much worse than covid will eventually get out of the lab somewhere (not just China) or a virus in nature will mutate naturally into something worse than covid.
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