I think you have the right idea. China has yet to truly flex its muscle. They prefer to quietly grow stronger. Their response to Covid with the largely successful zero covid strategy gives a clue about the power of its government. Silly, you can’t become the champion without stepping into the ring.
A country targeted in an ongoing hybrid war by the world's #1 superpower would have a (relatively) extreme response to a pandemic that originated in an epidemiologically interesting location deep in their inland territory, and that extreme response having any substantial national security impetuous is "batshit insane". Insightful contribution!
A big country would never overreact to national security threats. We have the TSA to protect us from that :)
China creates a superbug via GOF research. Accidently releases it from the lab. Shuts down its own economy. Puts the majority of it's citizens on house arrest, and that is "largely successful"? Please send me the AliExpress link to whatever it is you are smoking, it must be some good shit.
I think the real lesson here is that if you enough government power, there is no need to be competent. The feedback loop is destroyed so you can just do whatever random stupid thing you want until your country collapses like the USSR.
The WHO report was inconclusive because the lab withheld data.
This creates a bit of a catch-22, no? There's no basis to claim it was a lab leak because the lab in question won't cooperate with establishing whether there's a basis for the idea.
It'd be one thing if the proper amount of research was done and made public and we could see that there was no conspiracy. As is, there's a lab located in Wuhan studying coronaviruses that pinky promises that they didn't start COVID-19, while the WHO director is on record saying that the lab blocked the WHO investigation that might have exonerated them.
I think it's prudent to forgive people for whom "this is a baseless conspiracy theory" isn't a sufficient explanation.
The bar for 'they withheld data' can always be moved. Some data will always be considered withheld.
There was no shortage of data that was consistent with the bush meat market outbreak.
It would be one thing if the outbreak started in a theatre or a mall, or some other place which did not regularly traffic in exotic diseases. It's another thing when it started at the only non-lab active reservoir in the city.
Given the preponderance of evidence and probability, the lab leak theory is a baseless conspiracy at this point. It stretches credulity to think that of all the places the lab leaked, it leaked to the one place in town which was itself a dangerous source of cross-species disease transmission.
If there was no such wet market in town, and if the outbreak didn't center in it, the lab leak would have been a far more probable hypothesis. But that's not the world we live in.
The director of the WHO— who is Ethiopian, not a US puppet—is on record saying that the lab withheld data and China has rebuffed multiple attempts to collect the data that the WHO feels was withheld. How is that not a basis for the conspiracy theory?
I'm not even saying that it's right, it just confuses me to hear you so fervently insist that there's no basis for the idea when the WHO director himself says that there is and that the investigation was inconclusive.
We on this forum of all people should know that you can present partial data that shows completely different conclusions what the full data would show.
Why is a wet market a more convincing explanation than a lab whose explicit mission is studying coronaviruses, one which has been publicly called out for being uncooperative with the ensuing investigation?
More derailing than baseless, whether or not Xi did it on purpose or if the CIA did it or if aliens did it has no relevance to how they handed the event after it happened.