It’s been almost six weeks now. I haven’t seen the sunlight in over a month. Does the sun still exist? Can the sun catch corona virus? I hope the sun is alright.
My muscles are starting to atrophy and I can no longer lift anything heavier than 10 pounds. I’ve been subsisting off a diet of nothing but tap water and chicken flavored ramen. My data usage this month was 85 terabytes.
There’s now speculation that the virus may have had something to do with the infectious diseases laboratory that is about 9 miles away from the wet market it was originally reported that covid19 originated from.
There are hundreds of wet markets all over China, but only 2 biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) labs there. A BSL-4 laboratory is where aerosol-transmitted agents and diseases with no current vaccines are studied. The Wuhan lab had even been isolating bat coronavirus sequences since 2005. Yet the narrative persisted until now that a random bat being eaten by a random person in a random market right down the road from a coronavirus lab was ground zero for this pandemic. This could just be a coincidence, but it’s a phenomenal coincidence if it’s in fact a coincidence.
Of course, any mention of this laboratory is being brushed off as a “conspiracy theory” by the USA=bad types, like this unhinged weirdo:
It’s also just a theory that the virus came from someone eating a bat. There is another theory that the virus came to China from the US, via soldiers participating in the 2019 Military World Games, which were held in: *drum roll, please* Wuhan! They’re all currently just theories because nobody is 100% certain where the origin was.
Ironically, Ben’s entire post is a conspiracy theory. Ben here thinks that anyone being critical or accusatory of China’s government is merely a bad actor, attempting to bolster an inevitable upcoming war against said country. His twitter feed is full of this conspiratorial nonsense.
Ben is one of those kids who read the Communist Manifesto when he was 15, and now just resorts to calling everyone he disagrees with a “neoliberal” or “imperialist”. If you do a search for these buzzwords or variants on his account, half his post history shows up. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. He can’t comprehend that you can be critical of China, while also being critical of the US. His entire world view is dictated by the US always needing to be the worst by any given metric.
People like this have their reasoning so clouded by this creepy indoctrination that they miss crucial details. Details such as Trump having dozens of tweets like this on his twitter account:
It doesn’t seem like Trump is in a hurry to go to war with China any time soon. The guy practically has a closer relationship to Xi than he does with his own wife. It’s actually a little creepy.
There are also a lot of people attempting to shoot down the Wuhan Institute of Virology centered theory by pointing to this information:
This information merely verifies that the fringe who are pushing the theory about this being a biological weapon are wrong. The virus was not engineered, but is naturally occurring. Naturally occurring coronaviruses are held in that laboratory, and are capable of jumping from animal to human in such an environment as well.
This theory doesn’t need to be predicated on malicious intent. Someone at the lab could have simply messed up in some manner. Mishaps at laboratories happen with surprising regularity. The U.S has had a few incidents involving the mishandling of Anthrax at various labs over the last decade. The Wuhan lab in question also has a bit of a reputation:
To recap so far, there’s a biosafety lab in Wuhan that contained coronaviruses. It had a history of safety and containment issues. The Chinese government declared very early on, seemingly without proof that the virus came from a market 9 miles down the road. A large swath of US media has continued to regurgitate that narrative as fact, even though it too is still a theory.
In a bit of positive news, China looks to have temporarily put a halt on most of its wildlife markets. According to CNN: “Since the virus hit in December,almost 20,000 wildlife farms across seven Chinese provinces have been shut down or put under quarantine…”. However, wet markets were apparently banned in 2003 after the SARS outbreak, and poultry was banned from wet markets after the bird flu. These bans seem to have only lasted a short while after these outbreaks though. We’ll have to wait and see if the current bans actually come with any permanent change or not.
In related news, Trump seems to be hellbent on defunding the World Health Organization:
This is probably a dumb idea. We’re currently still in the middle of a pandemic and the WHO serves some sort of function, even though I’m not exactly sure what that function is. This is evidently a common sentiment, as there are 83 articles titled “What Does The WHO Do” on the internet. Having read a few, I’m still not entirely sure what exactly the WHO does.
Regardless, they do something, and perhaps it’s best to let them do whatever it is that they do until the pandemic passes. Then we can delve into issues of funding and accountability. If the WHO is guilty of some fault, we can probably worry about that down the line.
Evidently the issue here is that the WHO was selectively disregarding information about the virus, based on where it was coming from:
They then proceeded to release inaccurate data coming from potentially dubious sources:
It’s also important to keep in mind that this was the official consensus as of March 3rd, when the following was posted on the WHO’s website:
Covid-19 is both more contagious than the seasonal flu, and is absolutely driven by people who show no symptoms. Eight days after this post, on March 11th, the WHO declared covid-19 a pandemic. Given that the above paragraph was the official data as of 6 weeks ago, it makes sense that perhaps this thing wasn’t taken as seriously as it should have been by governors, journalists, and even Captain Trump.
March 11th is when the pandemic became official via the WHO. It was around this time that the shift from “it’s just the flu” to “this is serious” started to take hold in the media and in governments.
Trump pulled this about face in a mere 9 days:
To be fair, practically everybody pulled this about face around the same time. All the New York politicians from my previous post didn’t take the virus seriously until some time on or after March 11th. The mayor of London didn’t take it seriously until then. Vox, The Washington Post, and The New York Times didn’t take it seriously until then. At that point, the consensus was to start taking it seriously and start pointing fingers of blame. That blame more than likely lies with either the CCP or the WHO. Maybe we’ll find out in the next chapter.