[manaboutown]

Originally Posted by TexaninVA

Your first sentence is inaccurate. POTUS actually discussed the content of this report the other day at the daily briefing on national television. He described it as "...the Chinese were a little light on their numbers."

I agree with your "par for the course" but some don't and have essentially said the administration is no better than the CCP types who call the shots in China. That’s a form of civilizational insecurity or even self-hatred, and probably coupled with a severe case of TDS. There are also some naïve souls that essentially discount the possibility of China even lying at all on this topic. That’s more of a wolves vs lambs scenario. But, I digress.

The debate revolves essentially around three options:

1. No bioweapons lab involvement, the CCP is innocent and perhaps even a victim. The virus morphed and unfortunately jumped from bats into humans. (comment: this is the preferred option of the CCP for lots of reasons including minimizing civil liability and/or some type of more forceful response including kinetic)

2. The virus was developed in the Red Chinese military biowarfare labs and either through incompetence or bad luck, made its way out into the Wuhan market and then things took off from there. (comment: this is the option I think most probable. You can search “Brad Johnson Wuhan” to get a former CIA Chief of Station’s view on what amounts to bio-engineering etc. A Rutgers professor of Molecular Biology has also opined the Covid virus may have leaked from the Wuhan biolab. I don’t know if this link will pass muster with Moderator but it’s where I noticed the story so I’m including it.
Molecular Biologist Says COVID-19 Could Have Leaked From Wuhan Biolab | Zero Hedge

The cover story here is option #1.

3. The virus was deliberately unleashed by the CCP. This gets into the CCP’s long term (decades or more) strategic planning window for dominance over the West. The thinking here is China was losing the trade wars with the USA by encountering a POTUS that essentially said the gravy train was over, America First etc etc. The CCP concluded re-election was likely and felt they had to do something. Many, if not most, Americans reject this because the tendency is to view this through our ethnocentric lens. “We would never do that therefore they wouldn’t etc” The interesting point here is the absolutely huge cost /benefit tradeoff. Take a couple thousand domestic casualties (probably more like 25,000 vs the several thousand shown in daily reports by country) but the benefit is a literal shutdown of the US economy. It’s like a giant bomb went off in the atmosphere that killed the economy as opposed to people and buildings. The cover story here would be a combination of primarily #1 with a fallback to #2. Keep in mind Mao killed, or caused to die, 40-80M in the quest for the socialist utopia on earth. 25,000 or whatever in this case isn’t even a rounding error.

You have summed it up nicely. Thank you!