It's important to know and it's important not to know. Both paths have mostly negative outcomes. The best path is for it to have been natural, second best is accidental. Intentional is unfathomable and has unlimited downside. We should all hope that's not the case here.
Global power shifts to their favor by slowing down democratic economies, sacrificing parts of their own population and economy in the short term. As a collectivist dictatorship tracking every move of its population a pandemic is easier to handle.
Isn’t it also becoming more and more suspicious that they appear to literally be almost the best country in the world at controlling it. We are talking multiple orders of magnitude better. I struggle to understand how exactly.
People fear consequences for not following quarantine state orders much more I guess. They are just more used to abide an omnipotent state, meaning no public backlash or counter movements like in the west.
Except even if they report fake numbers if there was actually significant outbreaks we would hear about it still. It would leak. Something is super odd.
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.
The article doesn't support the case for it being intentional. Negligence at best.
One of the things Wade demonstrates is that China was most likely doing research on CoV viruses in ordinary labs with nothing more than gloves and a white lab coat. The standard photo of Dr Shi is of her in a pressurised bubble suit but that's bsl4 and virologists don't like working in those conditions because it slows them down. So the research grants say the work will be done at much lower safety levels.
I guess at some point you enter a gray area where gross negligence and intentionality blur together. But the bioweapon idea shouldn't take hold because it's obviously wrong on its face: the virus has no characteristics that would make for a good weapon of any kind. For it to be intentional would require some kind of theory involving vaccinations but Europe's irrational shutdowns of their own vaccine programmes throws a wrench in the typical vaccine related conspiracy theories.
I don't believe the lab escape was even remotely deliberate; however:
> the virus has no characteristics that would make for a good weapon of any kind.
Quite the contrary. The virus clearly favors authoritarian societies whose citizens will let their government weld them into their apartments. Just look at the death rate in China compared to the US and Europe. The only free societies that have come out unscathed are isolated islands (NZ, Taiwan).
That said, there is zero chance that the CPC had foreknowledge of this. They got very, very lucky.
Pretty much any virus 'favours authoritarian societies' to the extent that stricter restrictions and their observance reduces transmissibility. And pretty much any society is a lot less likely to worry about movement restrictions being illiberal in an actual war.
This happens to be a virus which focuses most of its harm on elderly people who can be triaged out of care where resources are stretched in conflict situations, causes relatively few issues for combatants and spreads in an unpredictable manner well beyond the target population. Its clearly insufficient to undermine the actual fighting fitness of the societies which make no effort to stop its spread, but at the same time it goes round the world killing random noncombatants and likely gets back to your own population via neutral countries. Clearly far worse as a bioweapon than many naturally occurring viruses, especially when you apparently don't have an antidote and your potential adversaries can develop one faster
Africa and random Eastern European countries have also been doing okay.
Over time, I have seen these numbers level out. Of course, there's still some disparities in how countries manage the epidemic, but it seems more a case of when a country will be hit, not if. The countries that managed their first wave well (Poland, Czechia, Ukraine, Turkey) have been hit harder in the second wave than other countries.
It seems that Covid spread and fatality nicely correlates with how integrated and mobile a country's society is. Which shouldn't be that surprising, I guess. The only countries bucking this trend are in East-Asia (not just South Korea, but Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, etc), probably due to their experiences with earlier outbreaks.
> Africa and random Eastern European countries have also been doing okay
Eastern European countries are topping the death-per-capita charts (and the ones that don't are still topping excess-death charts).
African countries are doing "okay" because their ratio of people above age 65 is 2-3% rather than the 20% in Europe, and case numbers are low because they don't have the money to mass test.
WWIII doesn't make a lot of sense. Nothing about MAD has gone away. And it would then be what, China vs. everybody? How would they even expect to prevail?
More likely result is that most of the world would stop trading with them. Nobody would want to see a Made in China tag on anything. Which would in turn be very bad for the economy in China and lead to unrest.
So the more likely outcome would be civil war in China.
>"I can't think of any other aftermath except for WWIII."
Yeah sure. We've just lost 3 million lives, let's kill the rest of the planet as consolation. As fucked up as our politicians are I hope they are not ready to die.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be scary, but I don't think we should be willfully ignorant. I want to know what happened. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
But don't you think it's important to know this?