Nearly 200 people under observation after Irkutsk lab worker dies from plague
themoscowtimes.com
themoscowtimes.com
Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
We’ll never know if the lab in Wuhan originated the virus. But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.
It's not unusual/unexpected that there were labs working on coronavirus research in several major Chinese cities: the 2002 SARS outbreak, which began in southern China and caught researchers and public health officials off guard, led to significant investment in the study of coronaviruses.
And when you look at the documented lab release of SARS-CoV-1, it killed the researcher's mother. If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest to the researchers at the lab who were infected, and the places they visited. Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.
The outbreak looks like a wet market spillover. The fact that it happened in the same city as WIV is an unusual coincidence, but if the virus developed in rural Hubei, it was likely it would spillover in Wuhan.
Zoonotic spillover is not a spontaneous 0->100 event, there should be a trail of intermediate hosts and adjacent infections that there is zero evidence of.
> If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest
thats not representative of sarscov2. People in the same household could fail to spread infection.
> Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.
It didnt. There were early cases outside of the wet market.
> unusual coincidence
A novel coronavirus appearing outside a coronavirus gain-of-function research lab is not a coincidence. Id sooner believe it was a sleight of hand to cover for a terrorist attack.
Is it possible that the animals at the wet market itself was the source? Sure. But it seems sort of coincidental to me it is also the most dense area of the city; could’ve already been spreading and this location just happened to be where a major outbreak occurred from density factors alone.
They also didn’t find any animal corona samples at the market. Also around 50% of people of the initial cluster had no connection to the market.
Also the hospital where the lab workers were treated was on the corner of this market.
All sides of the question were heavily politicized. The Trump administration and the US GOP have heavily pushed a lab leak hypothesis and used it to argue against China and against scientists (e.g. turning Anthony Fauci into a bogeyman). On the other side, China has blocked investigations and tried to steer public statements by various organizations away from anything that would question their government's motives or competence.
Quoting the report:
• ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2.
• ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2, although for different reasons.
• ⬛⬛ The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.
• ⬛⬛ Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon.
[...]
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ Several WIV researchers were ill in Fall 2019 with symptoms; some of their symptoms were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19. The IC continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19. [...]
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ While several WIV researchers fell mildly ill in Fall 2019, they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with COVID-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to COVID-19. While some of these researchers had historically conducted research into animal respiratory viruses, we are unable to confirm if any of them handled live viruses in the work they performed prior to falling ill.
So no matter where it comes from the chances are good a coronavirus outbreak will first be detected in a city that has a coronavirus lab.
Ideally, said belief is rooted in scientific methods, of course.
But there is actually no need for this "lab! No! Market! no! Lab!" ping-pong that seems to be developing here.
Except - as far as I know - the first patients weren’t.
In 2021 the WSJ reported that 3 workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 with symptoms resembling COVID-19 that they sought hospital care. Their source was a U.S. intelligence report.
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/intelligence-on-sick-staff-a...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210622121243/https://www.chann...
The WHO responded by saying the lab leak theory was extremely unlikely, and this line of investigation was dropped (except possibly within the government - this is the sort of information that would be convenient for governments to know but inconvenient for the public to know). But then in a follow-up documentary, a WHO scientist that published that statement says that they were under heavy pressure from the Chinese government to do so:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/12/who-origins-...
« lab leak theory » — Doesn't matter whether you adhere to the lab leak theory or the bat market theory. I'm sure there is a theory for some fringe group that points to “clear signs of extraterrestrian origin”, or “generated by AI”. Any crap will do. The only thing that matters in this business is that you believe there is some new-fangled and dangerous “CoVID” out there to get you.
If the alternative hypothesis is that the events are independent, yes. But it is somewhat more common to have labs studying viruses in regions where there are virus reservoirs. So the events "lab studying viruses" and "virus outbreak in local area" are not independent, as both are more likely in regions with viral reservoirs, and in particular, in dense urban areas thereof. A coincidence is not as extraordinary as it may seem.
Thing is, it is not possible to know at this point, as long as the virus does not seem to be bioengineered, whether it was a lab accident while studying animal samples or an outbreak starting in the market.
[0] https://www.public.news/p/first-people-sickened-by-covid-19
Unfortunately online search has gone useless and it's not possible to find out if anyone ever confirmed anything about that report. Just gazillion of other newslets repeating the original claim.
https://www.science.org/content/article/ridiculous-says-chin...
Just based on the logic of institutions, I'd expect all the parties involved here to start covering up before they even know themselves what the truth is.
For what it's worth, the "first patients were lab workers" part isn't established. What is documented is that the earliest cases cluster around the Huanan market. The lab workers attribution shouldn't be carrying the argument.
Before COVID, people were just unable to be roused out of their sleep about the dangers of cross-species virus transmission. "Wake me up when something important happens." By a certain standard nothing important had ever happened: so people slept on.
Then COVID hit. "Time to wake up." Suddenly people went from basically unconscious to hypervigilant overnight. Something which was a clear and present danger - the wet markets - looked uninteresting compared to the lab. Environmental samples taken there tested positive. In other words: don't sleep on the wet markets again - they are dangerous, then and now.
While paying attention was arguably an improvement over complete indifference, I don't think we landed in the right place.
That's how people start believing in supernatural explanations and conspiracy theories, though. Improbable events happen all the time; just because each event is improbable doesn't mean the set of improbable events that can occur isn't large.
Weird shit happens all the time, and we should expect it as a matter of random chance.
...with funding from a US group that discussed conducting this gain of function research in China using a spike protein at the furin cleavage site, a group whose members were appointed to come up with an explanation for what had happened.
Dumbest thing I've heard today.
Ever since we started studying autism, we found it! Therefore studying causes autism.
Not really; "there is probably a connection" probably was supposed to mean "could be studied, maybe a correlation is found", rather than "surely there must be a causation", which is what some people seem to want to take it for.
The assessment was later leaked and was published in a German Newspaper (https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/corona-bnd-china-li.3217...)
But the lack of transparency and the coverup to this day has immensely weaken the public trust in the scientific institution and government bodies for public health and safety.
The local government might know. They would have started a cover up reflexively.
But in either case, it could be that neither the local government nor central government wants to know or to find out. Ultimately, destroying the evidence and failing to cooperate with foreign investigators has cost China very little or nothing, even.
In short, I feel China should be admonished for covering things up, but not that the cover up proves the lab leak.
And that goes for western spy agencies too, by the way. Headless chickens all around.
A really easy knockdown for this kind of argument is - why did they close down, sanitize, and dispose of all animals and items at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market? If your argument is that a coverup points to the source, why wouldn't that mean the wet market was the origin?
But that's not at all enough evidence that they knew about the extent of the issue. Such institutions reflexively try to control information flow whether they themselves know what's going on or not.
If you enjoy diving deep on the topic I highly recommend watching the entire Rootclaim Covid Lab Leak debate https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r...
I expected that arguing for Lab Leak would be a huge uphill battle but it was surprisingly almost the exact opposite. Some of the biological arguments are above my head, but they decompose into timelines and other consequences that make it hard for a Lab Leak origin to be coherent.
But no, I'm sure it was the wombats.
I get so tired of hearing this rationalization. It's anti-science. Not all evidence is equal and the preponderance of evidence is heavily skewed to it being zoonotic.
Even Fauci himself kept a private diary where he wrote, "now we know the wet market was not the source, it was an amplifier" - while telling the public the opposite.
The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning. It's not just one line of evidence or inference, it's dozens. The only people I've met who still cling to the idea it wasn't a man-made pandemic tend to be people who work in public sector science themselves.
This particular was over a month before it was published, who's lying again? But this is discussions between colleagues as new evidence was coming in. If the investigation was tilted in the direction of the wet market we would have seen evidence of that, instead we see different people having different opinions on early and incomplete evidence and eventually coming to an agreement on what is more likely based on evidence they had at the end.
>"now we know the wet market was not the source, it was an amplifier"
Doesn't exclude that it was from natural origin. Amplifier meaning where it entered the human population and started spreading widely.
> The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong
There is a lot of conjecture for the lab leak theory, no real evidence. Meanwhile there's plenty of actual evidence that points to the wet market, such as the initial spread was clustered around the market.
>to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning.
This sentence alone is rather telling...
In these situations we rely heavily on intelligence services. For example, the German secret service has assessed an 80-95% probability that it was leaked from a lab in Wuhan and presented a report to then Chancellor Angela Merkel. [The assessment was later leaked and was published in a German Newspaper.](https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/corona-bnd-china-li.3217...) I think the German intelligence services are far better equipped, resourced, and have far wider access to sensitive and privileged data, than either of us.
I literally had to check the date on this post.
Does anyone else remember when claiming it was a lab in China that leaked was “racist”… but “they eat tainted exotic animals at wet markets” was “the consensus”?
Wild times!
Normally city + virus using country + virus is incorrect. But to call it racist or transphobic or fascist would be an incorrect usage.
Maybe place + virus isn't inherently racist, but it's been politically charged & exploited; best to put the combination down.
Similarly, you're referencing a name that was uncommonly used. People mostly called it the Wuhan Virus, which would be a far more typical name than "COVID-19". Major outbreaks are regularly named based on their origin: Spanish Flu, Hong Kong Flu, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Ebola, West Nile Virus, Marburg Virus, Zika Virus, Mexican Swine Flu, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
> The earliest probable cases were documented in March 1918 in Haskell County, Kansas, United States
Oh.
In other words other countries were effectively censoring it out of existence owing to WW1. Spain didn't have such censorship/propaganda going on, and so was seen as the epicenter (even within Spain!), even though it ultimately wasn't.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spanish_flu&oldid...
It's amazing how you had all those at the tip of your tongue, you are a clearly a learned medical scholar.
A peer comment discusses where the Spanish Flu originated, and illustrates the gap between what you asked the LLM for and well, how humans think and what the people you're talking to are actually talking about.
The LLM also went a bit overboard with the Wuhan Virus thing, it's a response, but it's hilariously out of context because, again, there's a gap between you're asking it for and what your interlocutor is communicating.
It's so confused that it's giving "Ah, but, people didn't say the thing you said was bad, because it was bad. The politically correct version was Wuhan Virus." - thus validating exactly what I said, the Chinavirus version was weird and bad.
Major outbreaks _were_ named like that, but as the other reply pointed out, the "Spanish Flu" did not actually originate in Spain at all.
It is for reasons like that, that WHO best practices now specifically say to not name diseases this way: https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-pra...
> Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations, people’s names, species of animal or food, cultural, population, industry or occupational references....
I think you are misremembering.
> The lab-leak theory had been floated by President Trump and others in his circle in April last year. It was widely dismissed at the time as an unfounded conspiracy theory with racist undertones.
https://theconversation.com/covid-19-why-lab-leak-theory-is-... (2021)
> New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli deleted a tweet Wednesday night that said the COVID-19 "lab leak theory" had "racist roots."
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ny-times-covid-reporter-... (2021)
> The lab-leak theory came to legitimacy by a circuitous path. It was first auditioned by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo shortly after lockdown started, but journalists were quick to distance themselves from its overtones of crude Trumpian racism. Nevertheless the theory gained new life last spring, when some of those same journalists — abetted by a chorus of concern trolls — began to question if they had been blinded by liberal partisanship.
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-42/politics/lab-leak-theor... (2022)
Some of this was a case of people failing to recognise that Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, reasoning (implicitly) like this:
Trump lies all the time + Trump said X => not X
instead of like this:
Trump says whatever suits him, regardless of the truth + Trump said X => no significant change to our credence in X
> Calling it the “Chinavirus” was obviously racist and weird.
That was a dumb Trumpism for sure, but separately from that, here in Australia, before the global spread of covid became too obvious to ignore, there was a sense among right-thinking people that even being concerned about it, let alone wanting to take any kind of action, was a manifestation of anti-Chinese racism / very literal xenophobia.
No. I remember it being called a conspiracy theory. And it still is.
But it's more like conspiracy fact by now. We have written records of NIH funded scientists literally conspiring with each other, even debating how to throw journalists off the trail.
Official report mandated by US Congress (under Biden btw): says it's likely it's a lab leak of a modified virus. CIA also changed its official stance and consider it's likely a lab leak.
The international expert who everybody based its idea that "it cannot possibly be a lab leak" has been debarred and cannot ever get funding from the US for research on modified viruses.
To me there's "something" off and it is a lab leak. And I always felt like this.
Hence you looked for evidence that matched and dismissed evidence that doesn't match.
Unless you can tell me that the majority of virologists agree it was a lab leak, I'm going to go with their majority opinion - which last I checked was that it couldn't possibly be a lab leak for specific genetic reasons.
It seems like which of these two is the majority opinion heavily depends on the language/country you read information in and also whether there are still in service or not.
The summary does not mention lab leak of a natural virus at all but the body of the article says it's perfectly consistent with the best independent evidence / investigation:
> The leader of the WHO investigatory team, Peter Ben Embarek, said "An employee of the lab gets infected while working in a bat cave collecting samples. Such a scenario, while being a lab leak, would also fit our first hypothesis of direct transmission of the virus from bat to human."[114]
Seems a little dishonest, no? Pretending that lab leak == bioweapon conspiracy is just deliberate distraction.
There's simply no hard evidence one way or the other - it's a natural bat coronavirus, but we don't know how it got to Wuhan (a city with a world class coronavirus laboratory which just so happens to be the only institute on the planet which worked on isolating, sequencing, and culturing novel SARS-like bat coronaviruses from field samples - literally the only one.).
So a guy who disagreed with the official CIA stance has been barred from obtaining funding for research from the US.
I mean, that just makes them seem more trustworthy.
Then it was made worse by Trump's insistence on calling it the Chinavirus (just to make it "not my fault!") and predictably then the anti-Trump left reacted by censoring any connection between the lab and the outbreak.
a) I don't know that they have the right skills to track down patient zero of a disease.
b) They certainly don't have jurisdiction to do such an investigation in a foreign country, unless invited, and there's no way they were invited.
I strongly doubt we'll ever see a good answer on this, unless we get very lucky and some random research sample is looked at later that shows detection months earlier in a different location or if the Chinese did a good investigation and kept it quiet, but it leaks in a couple decades.
A timely and thorough investigation might have been able to determine an origin, but the US FBI certainly didn't do one.
IIRC one of the FBI guys who investigated anthrax was like “yeah, it’s pretty obvious looking at what that lab was up to.”
You think China just lets US law enforcement do investigations on their territory without their consent??
> A natural origin is still the more likely theory, said Professor David Robertson, head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at University of Glasgow.
Is that right, or is your point simply that it naturally occurred in China in the vicinity of Wuhan? I ask since the OP mentioned military games.
>> And other US government agencies have drawn differing conclusions to the FBI's.
She also reports that Bush rode in the back of a laundry truck on the day of 9/11 to avoid detection getting to the Doomsday plane. Single source attribution, though.
Containment in Russia is different from that in China.
They expect stuff like this to happen, and to be fair I think Russia never stopped their bio programmes, and the fact that we are not all dead yet seems to prove them right, that their containment protocols are overall working.
This is not 79' Sverdlosk.
https://meselsonarchive.hsites.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omn...
The lab in question in this incident has a documented Soviet Biodefense connection.
https://nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/cns-archive/...
But there is no public or otherwise evidence that this is a military pathogen-production plant comparable to Sverdlovsk-19.
The institute’s activities include surveillance of naturally occurring plague in the Russia–Mongolia border region and training Mongolian specialists in plague diagnosis and prevention.
So the handling of pneumonic plague in this facility is probably an everyday occurrence, and not related to a weapons programme.
This is an institute for biodefense, not offence. There was a single person messing up and she paid the price for that mistake.
I understand people are on edge since Covid, but this is not that, or a bio weapon. Just a 28-year-old that dropped a tube by accident and then probably panicked and didn’t follow containment protocol. Shit happens.
Let’s hope she stays the only victim of her mistake.
Sucks to die because of pneumonic plague because a 28-year-old sneezed in the same cafe you get your matcha latte fix.
If you want to go down the incompetence route with potential weapons of mass destruction, you could also ask why US Americans allow their army to have access to nuclear weapons.
There were multiple incidents where American citizens almost got atomised on American soil. Not because of individual mistakes but institutional incompetence.
But you see no one fearmongering about that in public. Because they have proven they can lose a nuclear weapon and recover it, without harming the public.
Just like a single young Russian woman can fuck up and they contain the fuckup without harming the public.
There are about 1000 competent people in an army of the size of Russia, China or the US and that’s it.
It’s expected that most soldiers are incompetent, and just need to follow orders, and in ideal case be patriotic enough to believe they sacrifice themselves for the greater good if they get sent on a suicide mission.
I honestly consider the Russian forces tasked with biodefense and nuclear more competent than most of their other counterparts in other nations. They frequently train and you get hung by the neck if you leave a blast door open to let the pizza guy in.
In Wyoming you get promoted to three-star nuclear doofus in chief if you do that.
Feel free to read this if you want to know more about the people tasked with preventing nuclear incidents on American soil.
I would link the official page on the Air Force website (https://www.compliance.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-1312...), but the Trump administration is silently deleting all of these documents.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/963093/afd-131219-045...
That shit is indeed funny.
I think they need to investigate their safety protocols
> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.
> At least 197 people who may have had contact with her were reportedly placed under medical isolation, including more than 100 in hospital wards.
If anything, disposable plastic test tubes are the norm in microbiology labs at this point. No need to autoclave because they come sterile and you throw them away after a single use.
Plenty of plastic that's designed for it goes through the autoclave. For example micropipette tips. Nearly all of it is disposable single use so it only has to withstand a single cycle.
Speaking as someone who has a part of their job convincing people to follow safety processes, this isn't a Russia thing, it's a human thing.
Because they only have two diseases — clusterfuck and bullshit.
Clusterfuck is completely incurable, and bullshit just goes away on its own…”
Luckily you need to be in close contact with someone already very sick to catch it. It's not silent transmission like COVID. But maybe there is something different about this outbreak?
What does this mean? The article we’re discussing says the woman who died told colleagues she broke a test tube.
The article links to a telegram post [1] as source, which links to another telegram post [2], which now has an update:
>It is not known exactly how Darya Shipilova contracted the plague. Currently, the theory involving a broken test tube is the leading one, but there is no official confirmation or independent verification of this information.
(Google-translated)
The conclusion I drew from that is that people like Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow have asked a lot of questions about bioweapons in secret for a long time. And if he did it, you bet all similar leaders, in a wide sense, did it too. And I wouldn't like to be the scientist who got approached by security state people with these questions.
I guess I'm not conveying this well. What I'm trying to say is that we're not at all confident about anything like that - none of us - because it's all so hush hush because it's WMD-adjacent. The secrecy cripples our ability to have an honest well-informed discussion about it.
But totally agreed that that conversation should be had, a kind of test ban treaty would be useful but frankly, the three groups most likely to conduct this kind of research would never agree to such a ban.
Russia did a lot of work to control the plague with anti-plague vaccinations of cattle and pets, resulting in almost no human plague cases. This obviously requires research and development for vaccines.
BTW, same applies to anthrax. It also exists naturally, which surprises a lot of people.
Non-tabloid version is that she didn't catch it in the lab, she got ill "while being on a research trip to Buryatia region near the border where sources of the disease were found".
the government does cover-ups. There was already an epidemic problem earlier this year when they seized and killed cattle in Siberia while keeping silence and pretending nothing happens. Then they have to admit that there is a disease after unrest cause them keeping silence was used for messages like "gov helps big corpos destroy local farmers' business". But they still named less dangerous one, which didn't match the harshness of the protocol they used. Cause if they named the real problem, other countries would've stopped buying meat.
for the cattle epidemic see: https://ru-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1...
Is this a resistant strain?
Here's a newer CNN story from today:
>Researcher at Russian plague laboratory dies of ‘unknown’ infection
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/10/04/europe/russia-laboratory-...
This post from local Irkutsk region media (now in exile) is also interesting:
https://t.me/Baikal_People/16651 (in Russian)
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/4374289
Six errors contributed to this leak.
However, every year there's a few deaths in the US from the plague because it's present in a variety of animals. If you look worldwide, there's probably on the order of a thousand deaths annually.
I thought at least fleas could transfer it between mammals?
[1]: https://whyy.org/segments/the-tragic-case-of-smallpoxs-final...
According to Wikipedia, plague responds to antibiotics very well, since it is a bacteria, not a virus and it hasn't been widespread since the development of antibiotics, so it didn't develop any resistance to antibiotics.
If she knew that she broke a flask with plague (and, as I understand, she did know that), why don't start a course of antibiotics immediately, before any symptoms? Wouldn't she be totally fine it this case?
On the other hand "Baikal People" post from today is more worrying, as it says they quarantined 4 hospitals for 3 weeks: https://t.me/Baikal_People/16651
> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.
This is just weird. Plague is easily treated if antibiotics are given right away. I'm shocked that an anti-plague institute wouldn't have detailed and proactive plans in case of mishaps. Obviously I think it's likely that there is more to it than what's reported in the article, but I would find it truly baffling if within 60 seconds of her breaking that test tube that protocols weren't initiated to protect her, her colleagues and the community.
Of course, Russia...
Actually went to a scout camp as a teenager (in the 80s) and one of our scouts got the plauge. Took a long while for the hospital to identify it and get him on heavy antibiotics because no one had seen it in real life before.
i wouldn't rely as a source of information on some very niche outlet whose stuff located thousands kms from the place where something happens
> REN TV.
these are guys whose bread and butter are paranormal activity and UFOs
"But sir, you are talking about—"
"I am talking about courageous scientists giving their lives to protect Mother Russia. Any further questions?"
>“All identified contact persons have been placed under medical observation. As of today, the contacts show no signs of illness, and their laboratory test results are negative,”
Why is the knee jerk reaction of authority figures to say everything is fine? Be it epidemic risk, or cybersecurity incidents, the spokepeople always output noise in the form of "everything is fine", there's almost no signal
When the wuhan Lab leak happened in 2019 most of my direct and indirect mainland china contacts were more or less 100% sure that this was intentionally leaked by the regime, and even if it wasn’t, that the regime is going to milk it internally (vs dissent) and externally (vs the west). Especially given that this happened just a few months after the Hong Kong protest crackdowns.
The western center-left didn’t want to acknowledge any of this until it became politically feasible for their own gain and this alone cost us roughly the first three months of properly responding.
Let’s see if and how they’ll going to put their political shenanigans before their countrymen this time. I fear, with all the division they sewed it is almost certainly going lure them to double down on “Covidiots”.
The antiscientific, ventral, paternalistic-in-democracy (an absurdity) attitude had been systemic.
Now back to the topic.