"Let me be clear: Labs in Wuhan might not have played any role in the origin of the pandemic. But a year later, no source has been found, and the world deserves a thorough, unbiased investigation of all plausible theories that is conducted without fear or favor."
Okay. So basically this author has no evidence other than the fact that it's very difficult, maybe impossible to identify the site of first transmission. I don't know what progress would look like, but maybe sampling animals in the wild to find a carrier with a genetic signature that looks like an early version?
This is just speculative nonsense to try to hype the government's pivot to China. That's why its in the opinion section, the worst part of the newspaper.
Did you know the CCP arrested the first doctor sounding the alarm about COVID? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382
Did you know viruses have escaped from labs before? It is a known risk.
You can say the evidence is not conclusive and you would be right. But it's far from "speculative nonsense."
One wonders if you would be similarly skeptical of claims relating to COVID's cause being something much more speculative and vague... say, global anthropogenic climate change, for example. I'm sure you'd be pumping the brakes just as hard on any speculation to that effect, right? ;-)
The US media has made an art out of turning speculation into exciting narratives that large fractions of the population believe that turned out to be completely fabricated but retain adherents for years or generations after.
Officials sent two warnings to Washington about the lab. The column says the officials were worried about safety and management weaknesses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and called for more help." ... "What kinds of security failures were the cables describing?
The short answer is we don't know from the information provided in the Washington Post. But, generally speaking, there are multiple ways that safety measures can be breached at labs dealing with biological agents.
According to Dr Lentzos, these include: "Who has access to the lab, the training and refresher-training of scientists and technicians, procedures for record-keeping, signage, inventory lists of pathogens, accident notification practices, emergency procedures.""
In other words, all the information is non-public and coming from the entirely unreliable US Intelligence services whose job is to lie and make the US government look good. If these reports had been published (meaning in public documents) prior to the pandemic OR there was an admission by the Chinese government, this would be far more credible.
For one people actually believe Chinese's numbers, something no Chinese national will ever do.
China is a totalitarian country, they have the monopoly of the press. That means official numbers are not real numbers because if you go against the official numbers you just dissapear. You can not compare numbers given in a free press country against numbers being given by a totalitarian country.
That happened for decades with Soviet Russia, while Lenin and Stalin made tens of millions of people die of starvation, their official numbers were fantastic. They even exported grain.
There is no evidence because China made impossible for scientists to study the origin of COVID for almost a year. They closed their laboratories and removed all possible evidence with bleach.
In a typical city the size of Wuhan, what are the odds it has some sort of viral research lab? If this happened in (picking a city at random...) Chicago, you could work backwards, find a viral research lab in say, University of Illinois, and make the same claim. "No link to animal transmission has been found, and the original epicenter was known to have a viral research lab. QED."
I don't think anyone suggests the CCP unleashed the virus onto its own city on purpose.
And no, the vast majority of cities do not have viral research labs.
I believe in many conspiracy theories that have substantive evidence for them (e.g. the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was faked), so I don't dismiss the idea of a conspiracy as impossible, they happen every day. However, there is no substantive evidence presented here other than the mere possibility that someone might have done something bad.
I think you are referring to an event in Ukraine where some of the peasantry burned crops, but some exports were still bound for the cities. In the Irish potato famine, the UK exported food from Ireland even as people starved to death. In the US, farmers burned crops and poured out milk in the great depression as people starved.
Juxtaposed, there is little reason to treat foreign governments as inherently worse than our own and much reason hold them to similar evidentiary standards. My hope is that the standard would be high for both domestic and foreign stories.
It can well be a cover-up, which is a daily life in places like China. In USSR, every technological, radiologic or biological disaster was covered up, surfacing only when it was impossible to conceal.
Yes, governments tend to avoid releasing embarrassing info. Witness the way the US government failed to prepare for the virus and pretended everything would be fine and then only made changes when they couldn't possibly do anything else which probably is responsible for killing 500,000 people.
I'm not sure why you bring the American COVID response into this: its ineptitude was never even close to a secret, and the role of 45th administration in it is hardly disputed. If this is a kind of a "no u" response, well am not an American anyway.