[mrguyorama]

One important thing to note, the specific reason that this and calling it the "china flu" or blaming china or any of that is stupid as hell, is that it doesn't matter where it came from, pandemics are a sure thing on a not crazy timescale, if your country couldn't handle one in a responsible and safe manner, that's on your country!

[lordloki]

I disagree 100%. In this case everyone should still be calling it the china flu or some iteration to prevent exactly what China is doing now, turning around and blaming others. Not to mention the lying and deceit on all aspects of the virus and its spread in the beginning. It's China's fault that it (probably) escaped their lab. It's China's fault that they tried to cover it up. It's China's fault that they lied about how it spreads. It's China's fault that the bullied the WHO into downplaying it so the rest of the world couldn't close their borders in a reasonable time.

The only comment about a pro-China social media campaign is from someone defending China. That's not fishy at all.

[mrguyorama]

Or, you know, I'm having a boring day and went to the third page to try to find something to read and interact with and found a good excuse to vent a personal opinion of mine.

None of those things change the result. When the "spanish" flu started in America and we didn't stop it, it killing a bunch of russians may have been partially our fault for letting it leave the country, but russians should still be mad at their own country for not handling it better. Fault isn't discrete like that. Every country WILL get a pandemic at some point. Disbanding your pandemic response force and pointing the finger at china when the inevitable happens is gross. Trump was literally directly warned about a pandemic when he came into office, and still managed to bungle it for a long time. That CANNOT be blamed on china

[hunterb123]

There's a theory the Spanish flu started in the French lines from poor conditions of Chinese workers shipped by rail. It only spread to America from servicemen coming home. The truth is we don't know fully.

That being said, it's leaning pretty heavily it was a lab leak. There has been no animal sample close. The sample RATg13 is the closest DNA match and the gain of function applied to it probably produced Covid-19.

[angelzen]

None of those things change the result for covid. The real troublesome thought is that bio-experimentation is booming, at both state and private level. Assuming covid escaped from a lab, it is the largest man-made disaster in history, with a death toll larger than nukes. We have non-proliferation treaties for nukes (as feeble, leaky and toothless as they are) but we aren't even considering the same for bio.

[mrguyorama]

The reason against any ban or anything is that nature doesn't care about your pesky laws and happily tries to develop bio-nukes every single day.

I would vote for bans or limits on what is essentially bio-weapon research though, but that has implications. Should we finally destroy everyone's stockpiles of smallpox? Are we better off not having those stores to test with as we develop new technologies? I'm not an immunologist so IDK how useful an essentially dead disease is to keep around

[angelzen]

Nature very rarely tries to splice pox with influenza. Humans, OTOH, do all sorts of unnatural experiments. See the log of US-funded research in Wuhan.