>>11465511Let me start by separating three things:
1) guilt about the emergence of the virus and the way in which it emerged.
2) guilt about how the outbreak was handled once the virus had emerged.
3) conspiracy theories that are circulating on /pol/ about fatality rates.
I won't argue on point 2: the Chinese government did too little too late, and tried to suppress any information on the outbreak. That much is clear. We also agree that the Trump administration, as well as governments in Europe, did too little too late to stop the spread.
I strongly recommend to disregard the conspiracy theories of point 3. You cannot and should not trust the interpretation of the horde of mongoloids that is /pol/ on anything. Webms are not evidence. They lack context and /pol/ uses them to spread misinformation, willfully or otherwise.
On point 1 we also strongly disagree: I have tried to get the point across that monitoring animal populations is routine, not just in China but all over the world. The same exact thing happens in the US, in Europe, in the Middle East, and Australia. You find these labs everywhere. This isn't a point that you can chose "to buy" or not, this is simply a fact and as a scientist myself I am telling you that it is a fact and not up for debate. These labs are not secret and are not there to build dangerous viruses, they're there to predict outbreaks like this one. And in fact, as the papers in the OP prove, this outbreak was both likely and predicted. It isn't a bioweapon. It wasn't tampered with in the lab. It was a predictable outbreak that governments all over the world utterly failed to respond to. Virologists saw it coming, but they were ignored because in this day and age people, including you, choose their own gut feelings over the words of experts that spend their entire lives studying the things that they talk about.
