zlacker

> An intentional lab leak makes no sense to me at all. Its like starting a fire in your house to spite your neighbour.

Just playing the devil's advocate here, but, I'd argue that it makes quite a lot of sense from a biological warfare perspective in terms of intelligence gathering on how different societies and countries behave against such a threat.

In particular, the pandemic has brought to the surface the how large schism between the two parties in the US, the constant politicization of science and nearly every other topic, the vast differences in perspective of different groups of the population, and provided information on the outcomes of different measures in different cultural landscapes, the level of preparation of different countries, the time it takes to figure out the correct response, and the responses of the people in guideline changes.

It has also shown that a well prepared, authoritarian country, with mRNA vaccines in the works can incur very minimal losses in terms of population due to swift vaccine rollout, hard lock-downs and strict measures.

China's losses compared to say UK, US, India, Russia and others have been very small if the data they have actually provided are to be believed.

But all of this is pure speculation from a random netizen so take it with huge grains of salt.

>>Partia+(OP)
If that indeed was a master plan then Id argue it backfired massively, that information is not worth the losses and the risks, and is exactly why modern armies don't deploy biological or chemical weapons or zeppelins (because they are hard to control and are not effective against armies).

>>dreen+x3
Could you expand why it backfired massively?

>>Partia+l4
I did in the next part of the sentence, because the cost of that information was too big, even for China

>>Partia+(OP)
Or COVID was leaked into the public in China by an actor other than China.

China figured it out and unleashed a global pandemic by opening the borders to not be a victim of day the CIA.

It’s possible it’s intentionally leaked but not by China

>>dreen+z4
Could you elaborate exactly on what that cost was? Credibility? Deaths? Economic?

>>Partia+C5
What I'm saying is I think the risk itself is cost enough for them not to do it. Add whatever the losses are or we believe they are on top of that.

>>dreen+z4
I disagree; although I have no reason to assume that this was intentional, I can certainly imagine that looking back at what happened, many military planners would consider the current cost of Covid-19 to China as completely reasonable if it meaningfully changes e.g. ww3. Taking their stats at face value, <5000 deaths in China is something appropriate for a small conflict, and the economic cost from a country-leader perspective is effectively zero if your competitors bear the same cost or even a benefit if your competitors fare worse, which arguably happened.

It would take some years until we properly see all the consequences, but I wouldn't be surprised if afterwards historians would note Covid-19 as a factor that benefited China in their long term competition w. "the west", not as a cost.

Like, 5k deaths is something that I wouldn't approve of for almost any reason, but looking back at documented 20th century history, planners (both in China and elsewhere) were clearly willing to pay such and even much higher costs for reasons of global politics/power play, so the mere existence of such a cost by itself certainly does not mean that it's implausible that someone would intentionally order a thing like that.