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Eliminating the people in charge of keeping China honest on containing pandemics only a few months before China proceeds to not even try to contain a pandemic and blatantly lie about it seems like it might be a little related. Sure, they may have failed to contain it if they did try.
To be fair, the more important line of defense would have been keeping China honest on enforcing the rules about live animal markets they implemented after SARS and then stopped enforcing after a few years; I'm having trouble finding a hard timeline on that, but that's definitely primarily Obama's fuck up.
Wet-market origin has been discredited at this point - COVID was almost certainly leaked from a lab doing Gain-of-Function research. Changes to regulations around wet markets would have done absolutely nothing to stop the pandemic.
That said, the idea that the US could have done anything whatsoever to keep China honest in this regard is a joke - too many people in the US government had their fingers in this particular pie for them to be able to do anything about it.
Can you cite proof of this? I wouldn't mind being able to prove this to some people I know.
I actually don't have a single source that sums everything up - I'll go looking for one that ties everything up, but unfortunately all the good summaries I have so far carry the kind of undeniable political valence that makes them not terribly effective at convincing regular people.
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My impression was that that wasn't the case: I know there was some series of fairly thorough videos recently that I didn't watch where two sides presented their positions, and the judges ultimately came out in favor of the natural origins hypothesis.
Not certain what I think, though my priors definitely would lean toward lab leak, but I haven't looked at any concrete evidence.
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I don't know much about what they were doing there other than the articles you posted and similar ones that I remember from the time. The only specific position they mention from the CDC was a woman who trained Chinese workers to search for pandemic outbreaks. That does sound useful but since you're saying that the Chinese blatantly lied about it and didn't even try to contain it then detecting the pandemic wasn't the issue and having more Chinese government workers trained to do that wouldn't have helped. I don't know what leverage the CDC would have had to make the Chinese government be honest about anything.
Even in that article some of the people involved were skeptical that it would have made a difference:
China wasn't letting the CDC investigate:
I certainly don't think the CDC was capable of containing a pandemic in China given that they failed to do so in the US and that every other government that tried to contain it also ultimately failed, with the exception of a few island nations like New Zealand. Probably the only things that would have helped would be banning wet markets and banning gain of function research, but it seems like we've moved on now and nobody is going to do either of those things.
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