What’s more likely.
A pig growing wings or China having shoddy working practices.
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Another lab accident? Or are we talking pigs with frickin wings and frickin lasers on their heads?
Just ranting. Chaboudou culture. 
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Weinstein talks about this (in a sense) a bit in the talk I linked in the other thread, making the point that if somehow the Wuhan lab could be completely exonerated, that would still leave the uncomfortable question of how it arrived in Wuhan, because it has hallmarks of not being the product of natural evolution. But available signs do not at all point to the lab being exonerated.
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Not really. If Ccp wants to shut down any of its cities, they can do it bureaucratically, just issue any edict using excuses related to food safety or labour unrest etc. They could pick a more important city like Shenzhen or Shanghai. And the timing would not be end of Q4, but earlier. How about just blowing up the Three Gorges dam or engineering some sort of flooding? All of these are more plausible if your intermediate goal is to cripple one of your own cities.
The fact that world economy has shut down today due to covid doesn’t necessarily mean Ccp had the foresight and the organizational skill to plan such an operation.
And if you are in charge of pLA’s bioweapon program, or if you are in the position to authorize the use to cause world economic shut down, either way you would release the weapon on Taiwan’ semiconductor parks. At the very least Ccp shoukd have made sure an outbreak in TW in the very beginning.
The fact that even Taiwan was able to close its border to China so early and ward off the virus indicates Ccp was utterly unprepared and barely scrambling to cope with lab leak.
The economic-retaliation hypothesis is full of holes
Yeah sure, but if you were somebody in the Ccp bioweapon program, what other projects or alternatives can you come up with, to justify your employment and funding for career?
You actually don’t have a lot of “less complex strategies” do you?
If you were in a leadership position of ccp bioweapon, you wouldn’t propose to your boss a weapon that requires denoting on your own population in this fashion(wuhan outbreak) just to validate your budget is worthwhile.
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If I was such an official planning an intentional release, i would certainly not release it in Wuhan right next to the only lab in China known to be working on exactly that virus. I’d release it on the hill tribes in Yunnan and Myanmar, and then deal with it locally.
you then could safely refer to it as the Wuhan flu only once Wuhan had ‘successfully identified’ the virus.
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Jesus man don’t give them any ideas!
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Unless you wanted people to think it was an accidental lab release…
we can go around in circles endlessly. “Look, Ma, I’ve invented a perpetual motion machine!”
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Another loop then. What if it was understood that the virus signature would raise suspicions about GoF engineering?
You have to take into context what China was experiencing prior to the Trade War. Businesses were already leaving, costs had been rising in China, and “made in China” was becoming less and less lucrative for foreign businesses - with many already establishing exit plans.
Then suddenly came the Trade War which poured fuel all over the fire - businesses were not only leaving by the hundreds of thousands, this time Foreign Governments were giving incentives to businesses to leave China. You can see this especially across the tech industry. On top of incentives, sanctions were placed on many Chinese businesses and security threat blacklists were established.
By January 2020 when the phase 1 deal was signed, economists were still sounding the alarm - “don’t think it’s over, we are witnessing the biggest breakup in history” - the US and China were on the path to Decoupling. China knew this would be the case from the start of the trade war, they had already suffered prior to it, and it was only going to get worse. China needed to do all it could to turn things around, they desperately needed to stop the bleeding.
So how could China turn the tables? How could China make it more lucrative for foreign businesses to do develop and manufacture in China again?
Better yet, how could China make it so that these foreign companies that left China can’t even continue business in their new locations.
Simple - China released the virus to counter the escalating trade war. They released it on themselves first so they can shut down their supply chain, sending a message to the world of their established dominance, and showing that “decoupling” is not an option - that even those who moved factories to other countries would find themselves crippled still due to all the Tier 1 and more Tier 2 Suppliers still being based in China.
The supply chain world recognized the impact immediately - within days they were already assessing multi-billion dollars of damage - then more days passed, days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months, and now we still feel the shock from January 2020 supply chain shutdown.
China was banking on being first to “defeat” the virus - they very publicly needed to show to the world that China was opening up by Mid Year while the rest of the world was shutting down. They rapidly engaged in mask diplomacy (and eventually vaccine diplomacy) to further their agenda and increase their influence.
China wanted desperately to foster an environment where China was the only country operating at full capacity after due to their quick recovery, making all foreign countries rush back to China for all their immediate critical needs.
By Mid-2020, China was like “well well well, look who have come running back to China”. Companies that left China were scrambling because now the world was infected and shut down and the only way they could continue operations was to go running back to China. And even better for China was that the companies rushing back were willing to pay even higher costs than before! And costs continue to increase above normal rates!
Then there’s the Taiwan issue - yes China wants the semiconductors. Yes China wants Taiwan. They want the expertise, the workforce, and the strategic geography for shipping and military. Even with all that though, the Supply Chain on the whole is China’s priority. There’s trillions of dollars at stake.
There’s also the Oil issue which is complicated and could be its own thread. China is going to run out of oil - they need to ensure their supply, and their best shot is getting it from the Middle East. A majority of the oil they need is already imported (about 89-90% now) and a majority of that imported oil comes through the South China Sea. China expects conflict in the SCS so they need to defend against it or seek new paths to get oil. The virus buys China time and if you remember, during the oil crash in the middle of the pandemic, China starting buying massive reserves which was a strategic benefit for them.
In summary, virus is primarily for China’s economic benefit, plus a laundry list of secondary goals.
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The virus does show some enhancements to make it more likely to infect humans, compared to the RaTG13 bat virus that was discovered in intermediate horseshoe bats ( Rhinolophus affinis ) in the Chinese province of Yunnan in 2013, and was published2 only in 2020.
Whether these were deliberately engineered in by means of CRISPR technology, or other similar gene sequence insertion technology, is hard to say. Initial reports rumours I heard in early 2020 did suggest some of these technology markers or telltales were present, and also that an HIV-like addition had been made (furin cleavage site), but I can’t find that anymore, nor those sequences.
so that is explicit GoF work, directed and by design.
More insidious, and much harder to prove, but just as /even more effective is the passive GoF that you get from allowing evolution to do its stuff. Take a bat virus (or more than one at once) and force them to grow in a mix of human and bat cells, then select thee human cells that are successfully infected and repeat. This is called ‘passaging’: making them pass through a generation. each time you do that, there is a likelihood that you find a mutation that works better at targetting the human cells. hell, you don’t even need to use human cell lines: create a mouse cell line that has the human proteins you are interested in, in the correct functional positions on its surface, in place of the now-deleted mouse gene products. This is the so-called ‘humanized mouse’ that you have been hearing about. you can breed many thousands of these mice, and get many variants of virus that infect them and reproduce in them better than the original virus. Done.
if you do this work using sloppy containment practices, i.e., “cha bu duo la, BSL2 is FINE” then you will get an escape. Not intentionally, necessarily, but by accident. And that’s my best bet for what happened.
I don’t think they released it on purpose. I do think they were preparing it for possible future use: the lab was jointly used as a military research facility. Although that’s not what the French agreed to when they built it for the Chinese, with all the best intentions of using it to stop another SARS epidemic (remember how small that was in comparison?), but were then summarily kicked out by the Chinese and denied access. I also think EcoHealth Alliance should have been a lot more careful, especially given that there were many signs of sloppy work (and reports from US inspectors allowed in on rare visits). But EcoHealth Alliance, like so many US State and NIH agencies at the time, were still drinking the “China is a good friend, she will be our best friend soon” Kool-Aid.
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I guess it really depends on what you’re producing but supply chains don’t really move back and forth that easily. Vietnam has been an alternative for tech and other industries and has been a relatively stable alternative to China throughout the pandemic and before.
I would think the threat to internal stability would outweigh any benefit of upsetting the world’s supply chains.
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True, not easy to shift supply chains back and forth - but the key I think are the measures companies took to cover losses in operations outside of China; those decisions led to China being the only major economy to grow in 2020 (yes Taiwan’s grew too). China projects a further 6% growth in 2021.
Video will be posted tomorrow by her.
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While Peter Daszak swore blind that there were no live bats at Wuhan, his work did not involve taking or holding them there. His work was all about collecting samples in the field, and keeping them frozen for analysis at the lab. So it is quite likely that he was not aware. Even though he did cover his ass by totally not understanding what the hell was going on.
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This might help people change their minds.
https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2021/06/17/breaking-chinese-defector-confirmed-as-top-counterintelligence-official-n398374
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Wow. If this defection turns out to be for real, that would be a major embarrassment for China.
The only question is whether Dong ends up telling the truth or if he has some personal axe to grind.
Taking his kid out with him is a good look if it is smoke. But, yeah, like the story says it could be why the Biden admin changed it’s tune.