What I just wrote must sounding disgusting, but let's not forget we're talking about country which until very recently practised forced abortion upon women choose to have more than a single child (pursuing an absurd and nonsensical policy which might imply that the CCP is not the most rational bunch...) and is still sending thousands if not millions of people in to concentration/reeducation camps merely because of their ethnicity and religion.
Of course engineering a virus for that purpose would be highly impractical and utterly absurd (one would hope so at least...).
Not necessarily true. The lab in question has been known to house coronavirus variants and done bat research. SARS-cov-2 isn't the first coronavirus out of China, remember SARS-cov-1. This is not in dispute. What was in dispute is if it leaked from there or not, or spread naturally outside human error. The proximity of the lab to the first cases, the measures taken there before the known spread of the virus and their attempt to destroy information about it is what leads to speculation. We may never know what actually happened outside anecdotal information without more information from China. Given the low likelihood of it being human engineered though, we should probably still be able to trace how it evolved in nature before spreading to humans. I don't see the correlation between this and the zero-COVID policy. Labs (ethically) work with pathogens all the time, they obviously don't inject viruses into humans without substantial cause.
There's a long history that shows this is clearly not how lab leaks work.
why would this be the case? any secret informational advantage they had at the start evaporated as soon as it got outside their borders. and today's virus is very different to the OG one they had in the lab before it was (presumably accidentally) leaked.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-r...