Drawing on multiple research efforts, including studies by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), findings suggest that SARS-CoV-2 was likely circulating in the U.S. well before the first known
The idea it originated in the US always made far more sense to me. Consider the so-called “Spanish flu” of the early 1900s, which is since believed to have originated in the US; same idea, some tried to call Covid the “China virus” or “Wuhan virus”, though I don’t think it caught on very well. Also worth considering is how bad the US can be on health and safety in general. It’s hard to keep track of how many different ways those of us in the US are probably being poisoned by our food in one way or another. Or issues with air quality. Or the healthcare industry being so bad that a health insurance CEO got murked and people were like “yeah, that makes sense.” Or the oil/car industry insistence on cars which no doubt leads to more injuries and deaths than we’d otherwise have if we had high speed trains. Or MKUltra type stuff, willingness to experiment on their own citizens. And just the general brittleness and poor oversight that comes from when you put so much in the hands of industry privatization.
I mean, it’s a country that treats people in other countries like ants to stomp on. And does more or less the same to local people who step too far out of line, or at times just have the wrong skin color. Or are convenient for taking advantage of.
Meanwhile, the China origin argument requires a sort of “the enemy is both strong and weak at the same time” narrative to make sense; somehow, it has to exist in this simultaneous state where it is bad at regulation and safety, and so allowed a lab leak, but also peak at surveillance and control, and so it was one of the most effective at shutting things down and controlling the spread???
But the US doesn’t face any such contradiction. Its barbarity is messy and can operate in a more gangster-like way than heavy order, so this kind of thing makes sense that it could slip through the cracks and then opportunistically be leveraged as propaganda against other countries. Or even be an “accidental” lab leak without strictly being intended as such through an official order.
To be fair, I’ve read that China does have issues with food safety, but I highly doubt it’s anywhere near as bad as the U.S.'s current and coming issues. And China is still very much a developing country, and is improving sanitation and health procedures and policies.
I’m sure nowhere’s food safety is perfect. My point there is more about degrees of comparison. One of the talking points I remember when Covid was getting started was this stuff about China and something something “open air meat markets” and this being speculated as a way it started, along with the Wuhan stuff. But naturally, this was written by the west, who also writes things like “at what cost?” about China trying to address poverty, or claims they are committing genocide, or says something something Tiananmen social credit, so the whole narrative there is suspect from the get-go.
Incidentally, this is something I want to write its own post about, but haven’t gotten around to completing it and posting, is the difficulty sometimes in talking about the realities of AES states vs. the good/evil dichotomy. In dispelling, or arguing against, propaganda against them, it can sometimes come out sounding like the view is that there is nothing wrong with them and they are utopian. When the goal is something more like trying to straighten out how they rank in comparison to other countries and also how they are doing in comparison to the phantom version of them made up by the anti-communist west.