zlacker

>>lazycr+(OP)
Forgive my ignorance but even if it was lab created, so what? I don’t really understand why it matters or not. Didn’t the entire world basically have a nearly 3 month heads up on this either way?

>>endisn+R9
The US and Western Europe find it very important to find any way to increase anti-China sentiment. Whether or not it is actually meaningful in a practical sense, accusing China of creating and spreading the virus adds to the ancient enemy status that it shares with Russia, and justifies large domestic expenditures.

The public justification for the giant US nuclear arsenal was the entirely fictional "missile gap," thereby creating an actual missile gap in the other direction that the Soviets thought they had to close. I'm not saying that "If new coronaviruses are being cooked up in Wuhan, we'd be negligent if we weren't funding development of our own" thought processes will necessarily become ascendant, but "China is a existential threat to the world, and any expenditure is justified in order to defeat it" is absolutely common.