Comment by sajithdilshan
15 hours ago
To a certain extent I can understand why no country wanted to point fingers at China because they didn't want to piss off their biggest trading partner. Especially by Germany, given how much they relied on China to buy their cars back then.
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.
I think the desire to protect trading relations was a component, but there were plenty of politicians willing to call for proper investigation in China. My perception was that the larger suppression was cultural. I myself was called racist on many occasions because I thought the risk was quite high that it came from a lab. For some reason it was less racist to suggest the virus came from a web market.
I agree with your comment re trust. I'm not sure institutional trust (at least in healthcare) will be regained in our lifetimes. I love vaccines, and I had all of them prior to and during the outbreak. Since then I have become profoundly wary of taking any medication without extensive longitudinal research.
I think a lot of people associate the lab leak theory with racism because it was most loudly championed by racists who were 100% sure it was a Chinese lab leak and they were not shy about sharing that opinion, well before there was enough evidence to support either claim (lab or wet market).
It seems people who actually looked at the evidence and came to the lab leak conclusion independent of racism got caught up in a 'racist by association' event.
I never understood the racist or xenophobic accusations, like since when was it wrong to question the authority demanding truth and facts.
But then again 2020 was the start of woke culture and everything and everyone has to be politically correct even though whatever you said ended up offending some group.
The vaccines work, however there will always be side effects to significant portion of people when it’s administered to billions of people. Although I find it dumb that young healthy people still get covid booster shots like you have the immunity already and your immune system now knows how to handle the virus
> I never understood the racist or xenophobic accusations
Here's the setting, 1000s are dying in hospitals every day. People know very little about how to protect themselves. The first country that was really hit locked everything down hard to reduce transmission.
Regardless of how you feel, separation and isolation is sure fire to prevent grandma dies via drowning in her own mucus.
But preventing deaths is anti-freedom. We can't prevent the deaths, but we can find someone to blame.
So we blame China because our own public health facilities cannot keep up with the actual virus. It's a human right to infect as many people as possible. It's a human right to have a 7th grade reading level while also telling doctors to "do their research".
Vaccines and quarantine have been selected as a culture war target. It's all over facebook now. Minions are telling your mother only dumb people get vaccines.
Since you can't be mad at a force of nature, you create conspiracies that the dastardly Chinese have released a virus while simultaneously moving mountains to prevent the spread within China.
The smart thing would be to follow the moves of the supposed evil country that wanted to kill americans, by doing what they do to protect their own citizens. Not today commies, they're both at fault for creating a virus, and any attempt at not dying is communism.
The Aristocrats.
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