This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world. We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.resea...
> Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future.
China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I think it’s silly to presume CCP engineered a virus as part of some warfare strategy, or even to vilify/sanction them for a lab leak if it indeed was the cause (mistakes happen). However, CCP’s resistance to a proper thorough study of the origins of COVID is IMO not exactly appropriate.
Active research was taking place in the vicinity of suspected ground zero. Lab escapes happen—there are well-documented cases of the original SARS virus leaking from a lab in Beijing in 2004 (killing at least one person). Why was this time such a scenario discarded as so ridiculously impossible at first, and is still considered “extremely unlikely”? Is it politics?
[0] https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-...
Now, an unintentional leak would be theoretically possible with these initial intentions but then wouldn’t China still have a leg up on developing treatments? If so, wouldn’t we have seen that in their vaccine development?
Of course you this is all uneducated speculation. Quite possible that engineering a deadly and very infectious virus is easier than creating a cure or a vaccine by orders of magnitude.
It's a pure mapping problem. There are thousands of known viruses that affect humans. But most viruses don't have thousands of vaccines.
Additionally, there are constraints. The only contraint on a virus is that is needs to reproduce, and cause harm. Any kind of harm will do, and any kind of spreading is fine. But the vaccine needs to not hurt the person (at least, don't hurt them worse than the virus would).
Even if both processes involved similar techniques, the constraints on virus production are more favorable to the researcher than vaccine production.
To get back to whether China or any nation would intentionally create a biological weapon, however...: most industrialized countries realized a long time ago that bioweapons tends to be a bad strategy. Most western countries stopped their bioweapons programs back in the 70s for the simple reason that there was no reasonable use-case for a bioweapon that isn't done better by simply bombing something (or more recently-hacking their infrastructure). Bioweapons are strategically useful for small nations, and terrorist groups.
People underappreciate just how complicated and time-consuming this is.
Immune systems are terrifying things, on trigger alert (they have to be!), and you have to tickle it just right without making everything explode.