Once the pandemic emerged, the CCP's response was certainly terrible in many well-known ways (e.g., their attempt to suppress Yan Limeng's initial alarm, and the disappearance of multiple citizen journalists from Wuhan), though it's impossible to know whether a better response could have suppressed its worldwide spread. That's a separate question from those earliest origins, though.
I just don't think the anti-CCP sentiment is unjustified, though.
Whether it was a lab leak is important but a misdirection.
Their cover-up of the true scale of the problem (lab leak or not) made it hard for politicians in other countries to lock down quickly. It helped it spread intentionally to multiple countries and by then it was too late.
If they were blasting their sirens early in 2021 instead of covering it up we might have had swifter border closures etc.
I disagree. The actions from a lot of countries were absolutely lacking, even when they could see how bad it was given both China's data, and Italy, Israel's initial incidents.
China locked down super hard towards late February/mid-March.
During this time there was countless reports about the "ridiculous" and "draconian" lockdowns that occurred in China. The West basically pointed fingers, laughed, and said we'd be fine. And yet they're still not.
> If they were blasting their sirens early in 2021 instead of covering it up we might have had swifter border closures etc.
I agree that even earlier warning would have been good. I just don't see it changing anything. Countries only started to take it seriously when it really started to affect them. They didn't want to risk a political/ financial hit on taking the measures that were needed, and they paid for it.
I'm in Germany and the whole situation is a joke. Incompetence in any way possible, everywhere. Half heated "soft lockdowns" whenever things get worse, reopen everything as soon as it gets a little better, then be all surprised that incidents are on a rise again, rinse and repeat. Obviously every state does this without any coordination with neighboring ones.
And it's not surprising. Do you think any politician is even remotely qualified for the position they have? Usually you get your position as minister of health, or defense, or whatever, but because everything in Germany just goes its way and nothing is wrong, you do your four years, pass a few meaningless bills, and that's it. Now that we have a pandemic at our hands and the minister of health would have to actually do something for the first time in several decades, the whole spiel falls apart.
I'm absolutely not saying the origin doesn't matter for anything--if 2.9M people died due to a particular class of research, then that absolutely should affect our judgment as to whether that research should be funded or permitted (though that cost/benefit tradeoff seems grossly unfavorable to me regardless). The link between that question and China's perceived culpability just seems bizarrely overstated to me, divorced from the reality that the USA was entirely supportive of that research pre-pandemic.
So a lab leak, if true, would indeed significantly increase the number of lies being told.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1181292.shtml (USA, misidentified as vape lung)
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1183658.shtml (something with Fort Detrick)
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202101/1214376.shtml (not the Huanan market, maybe imported seafood)
I guess you could try counting up and comparing the total lies implied by each origin, but the volume is so high that seems pointless to me. Their strategy seems more like a general fog of confusion to me than a particular story intended to be believed.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-did-the-world-shut-...
One of the first things done by the Trump administration was close borders with China, but it was not enough.