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COVID: released on purpose?
This is the most disruptive (and deadly, according to the government) of our lifetimes and I haven't seen any leaders talk about COVID as a tragedy or natural disaster. The lack of any blood, or even any question of blame in response an event of this magnitude is very weird. A large fraction of people believe COVID was a lab leak from some combination of China and the US, but there is no discussion about it. It would have been easy enough to throw Fauci and Daszak or some Chinese guys under the bus without any other damage, but we don't even get a sacrificial lamb. Furthermore, the policies they did in response are policies they wanted to do anyway and are happy about.
Governments either believe they owe their people nothing (believable!), or this was such an enormous crime that pulling the thread is too dangerous to attempt.
Ultimately, I don't think the origin of the virus really matters.
There are two popular scenarios for the introduction of COVID into the world.
The commonly accepted scenario, where the virus emerged in bats consumed at a wet market in Wuhan.
The commonly disparaged scenario, where the virus was the product of activity occuring in lab near to the wet market in Wuhan.
If scenario 1 is true, China deliberately withheld information about the virus from the WHO in the first month of the pandemic. This was information that might have been of benefit to other world leaders in planning health strategies.
However, those world leaders spent the first few months encouraging behaviour that would directly contribute to the spread of the virus, before u-turning and banning not only intimate contact with strangers but also contact with those close to you for months at a time. If China had co-operated and released full information, would they have acted upon it?
If scenario 2 is true, then as you say a handful of the world's elite aided and abetted an extremely dangerous practise that produced a pandemic, then tried to mitigate it by one-upping each other in terms of damaging hygiene theatre. With the introduction of the vaccine (which I would like to point out that governments were doubly lucky in that it came out incredibly quickly and did not have terrible repurcussions when they decided to inject into literally everyone), WEIRD nations were offered an out and everything that was done to you should be forgotten.
I note with interest that only the US media has produced articles to the effect of requesting an amnesty for actions taken during the pandemic. This is mostly a product of the US having a significant anti-lockdown political movement in the form of the republicans. In most European nations measures had bi-partisan support questioning the measures is an extremely fast way to make yourself a pariah.
In both scenarios, the public demonstrated that they could be mostly cowed into submission with threats of mass death several orders of magnitude greater than observed reality and readily available bread and circuses, which very happily dived into. Some have taken to being a Nietzschean Last Man with incredible devotion. If I was someone like Biden or Johnson or Xi or whoever I would not be remotely afraid of the man in the street, or at the very least I would re-evaluate just what exactly would drive him to rise up and overthrow me, because everything I've done to him so far barely got a peep out of him. I might even release COVID-like viruses all the time for fun.
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China has another reason to play up the lab leak theory: the leading scientific theory (spillover resulting from improper handling of market animals) implies that COVID-19 is their fault. After SARS they clamped down on live animal markets, but over time, while they remained illegal, the government didn't seriously enforce the laws against them. In other words, they knew what they had to do to stop a pandemic, tried, and failed (or gave up). That makes them look culpable and/or incompetent, so they don't want too high a confidence assigned to that theory.
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blurb of the third DDG result for 'biden covid tragedy'
covid lab leak discussion has solidly entered the mainstream over the past year. There's still a lot of people saying its not ok to say it and racist, but 'centrists' have openly discussed it for a while.
It’s discussed, but the tone seems to be more apathy than anything else, which is what OP is arguing against I think. I tend to feel the same way, I truly do not understand how someone could concede Covid being a lab leak and having just a completely apathetic response.
Goes to show how nihilistic and conflict avoidant our current generation is.
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My tinpot theory is that the Chinese think they were targeted by an American bioattack and are playing it cool before they hit back harder.
China got targeted by Japanese biowarfare in WW2 - this is well documented. The US swooped in and took all the Japanese biowarfare technology and freed assorted war criminals on condition they work for the US. Now the CCP maintains that the US used that same biowarfare against them in the Korean war, evidence is mixed on whether it's true. The US obviously denies this.
Now given that the US NGO Ecohealth is at the core of the Wuhan fiasco, they'd be reasonably suspicious that they're getting bioattacked again. The Party would naturally be biased to suspecting foreign conspiracies from their primary rival. The other option is domestic incompetence.
But why would they announce their suspicions to the world? Announcing a bioattack means saying you were attacked with weapons of mass destruction. That's a good justification for full-scale war. China's nuclear forces aren't quite ready for war with America, there are a bunch of issues with their ability to deter. Conventional forces are similar. It would be humiliating to say 'we were attacked and aren't doing anything'. The other option is losing a war that they're not quite ready to win.
I think China is maintaining its zero-Covid strategy to shield its deployment of a powerful bioweapon. They just discovered that they have the best lockdown capacity on the planet. Nobody else squelched COVID as well as they did, nobody else has the state capacity and ruthlessness to lock people up as proficiently as they do. Unlike Japan or New Zealand, China had no warning time, they were the first hit by COVID. It's to their comparative advantage to wage biowarfare, they're the best at defending against it. They're even managing to stall Omicron.
So at some point some dangerous disease will be deployed, likely in America. Maybe it'll be next to a US biolab, it'll definitely be near a major transport hub. The West is tired of COVID and we don't mask like the Asians do. We get hit hard. China already has its defences in place, they're fully activated. All the bureaucracy is already set up, they can instantly cut off travel in response to this new disease. It'll look like a fortuitous coincidence.
In conclusion, the Chinese aren't playing up the lableak angle because they're preparing a crushing counterattack. Secrecy is vital. The Americans are either unsure about what really happened or they don't want blame cast their way (which it inevitably would given US involvement). Fauci and Daszak haven't been executed lest it spoil the plans of the superpowers.
This is a terrifying thought, and I suppose somewhat plausible. I’d hope that China wouldn’t stoop so low but I don’t know enough about their leadership to comment.
I tend to agree that Covid and mask fatigue would put us in a truly bad place if a deadly pandemic were around the corner.
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