zlacker

>>ruarai+(OP)
This has honestly been my unbiased opinion since essentially day 1. I believe that the release was almost certainly a complete accident, but there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus. The denialists, including the WHO and CDC and everyone else, need to get real and own up to what happened and figure out how to stop it from happening again. This has nothing to do with the PRC or anyone or anywhere else, it could have happened at any biological facility in the world and will eventually happen again somewhere unless scientific honesty and cooler heads prevail.

>>crx07+ML
Sometimes diplomacy means you smile when you don't want to smile. WHO has to play politics until we get this virus under control (ie, vaccines distributed worldwide). If WHO blames China now, in the thick of things, it would damage the world's ability to further study the origins of the virus and the results of Chinese research. Chinese vaccines are being used and studied in many countries worldwide and that is a good thing. Apart from the obvious benefits of those vaccines, better access to data gives us an inactivated vaccine counterfactual with which to evaluate the mRNA and protein subunit vaccines.

CDC and other US government officials, on the other hand, must ratchet up their criticism of China as well as WHO. I agree with you there. It's alarming that there are so few PR ramifications for China. From the looks of it, either their unsanitary bushmeat consumption got the world sick, or their irresponsible laboratory containment procedures did. Both are a reflection of China's culture, and were only exacerbated by authoritarian crackdown upon the early warnings issued by Chinese medical professionals. The US government shouldn't defend bad practices and systemic problems in the name of multilateral cooperation. That variety of ethical blindness forgives bad faith from our counterparts and damages our hegemony.