It does astonish me how poorly people understand different in _magnitude_ between offences and how quickly we get into whataboutism.
>If a similarly dangerous flu mutation jumps from a pig to an undocumented agricultural worker in the United States, and goes viral across the globe, will you also refer to that as 'unleashing a pandemic'?
Absolutely, why on earth would you think I wouldn't? I'm borderline offended by the implication and this subtle-not-so-subtle 'if you criticise x you're racist' narrative is dangerous nonsense. Refrain from it please.
>Animal rights advocacy groups have for decades been reminding us that conditions in modern farms are dangerous and unsanitary, so it's not like we don't have any advance warning for it.
Absolutely, and spillover from ecological incursions is a huge issue. I hope there is more emphasis put on the risks now. I recommend the book 'spillover' on this topic.
However it's vitally important to realise - some countries are at higher risk than others for various reasons, China being a HUGE flashpoint for this issue, and there ARE things we can do.
Wet markets are disgusting horrific places and also HUGELY risky from a spillover event perspective. In 2003 and SARS 1 (note covid-19 is literally SARS v2) this is precisely how the virus emerged. China's response was, as now, to only briefly close these horrific places of animal torture. The world remained silent and no pressure was put upon them to change this. We already had our warning.
They additionally covered up the outbreak and punished those who reported it. Do not defend this either implicitly or explicitly. There are reports that, had they immediately reported it, we could have avoided 95% of worldwide cases. 1.5M * 0.95 is quite a lot of deaths to be directly responsible for isn't it?
As I said in another comment, it is very possible another pandemic could break out even if China did everything they could to prevent it. But to ignore serious points of vulnerability which indeed caused a previous outbreak and then to try to cover it up is unforgivable. There is a genuine case for that being considered at the very least a crime against humanity if not an act of war given the consequences.
>... Also, it became incredibly clear to anyone that was paying attention that COVID was a serious threat in January. Yet, most of the western world collectively sat on its hands for the next month and a half. Will your historians also leave a few chapters on the subject of just how incapable our societies are at dealing with epidemics?
China told the WHO there was no human-to-human transmission in January as per their famous tweet. And it came out later evidence to the contrary came not from Chinese authorities but in fact WHO representatives on the ground. So believing the WHO and China is part of why.
No question most countries utterly fucked this up however, and there is much to improve, but to ignore the totalitarian, evil government responsible for many millions of deaths and who harvest organs and put people in concentration camps and to do the whole 'oh but you'd never say that about the USA lol' thing is really not on. I would be just as firm on any country responsible and if they did not do EVERYTHING in their power to prevent and mitigate this I would castigate them, even if it were my own country.
In China doing that gets you disappeared. Remember that and remember the privilege you have to disagree with me. The Chinese do not have that luxury.
> Absolutely, why on earth would you think I wouldn't?
Because in this very sub-thread, you're making statements like:
> China's response was, as now, to only briefly close these horrific places of animal torture.
In contrast to what? The horrific places of animal torture from where our supermarket meat comes from?
Pardon my skepticism, but I'm not sure you're applying the same standards to their barbarism, as you are to our barbarism. You don't seem to be applying the same standards to their ineptitude and malfeasance as you are to our ineptitude and malfeasance.
It comes off as nationalistic baiting, which is incredibly frustrating, because it's happening in the context of lordnacho's post. There's a prevailing zeitgheist in the US that all our problems are the fault of other, bad countries - which is used as a diversion from finding actual solutions to these problems. We've seen this play out over the past year, to the tune of 250,000 dead.
You're surely familiar with the meme of a an incompetent authoritarian regime that's busy blaming everyone around them for their domestic problems, while their people starve. Over the past year, we've been living this meme. We should be looking back at it with self-reflection, as opposed to cheerleading it.
I don't think it's so much whataboutery as disappointment about the west.
What you say about China is true, there's a one-party state that has done some brutal things.
The disappointment is that we in the west thought we had a better way to govern, but the state where the disease originated is doing quite well despite all those criticisms, and the states where people are supposedly free are the ones where people are locked up in their homes unable to celebrate Christmas with their families.
We had a head start, we had sources that knew the truth about the disease, we'd seen smaller outbreaks before, and we have more money.
It's also simplistic to blame China for the whole thing. "They could have saved 95% of lives" is not the whole ethical story. If you know you're living next to someone unreliable, you need to take your own precautions.
>If a similarly dangerous flu mutation jumps from a pig to an undocumented agricultural worker in the United States, and goes viral across the globe, will you also refer to that as 'unleashing a pandemic'?
Absolutely, why on earth would you think I wouldn't? I'm borderline offended by the implication and this subtle-not-so-subtle 'if you criticise x you're racist' narrative is dangerous nonsense. Refrain from it please.
>Animal rights advocacy groups have for decades been reminding us that conditions in modern farms are dangerous and unsanitary, so it's not like we don't have any advance warning for it.
Absolutely, and spillover from ecological incursions is a huge issue. I hope there is more emphasis put on the risks now. I recommend the book 'spillover' on this topic.
However it's vitally important to realise - some countries are at higher risk than others for various reasons, China being a HUGE flashpoint for this issue, and there ARE things we can do.
Wet markets are disgusting horrific places and also HUGELY risky from a spillover event perspective. In 2003 and SARS 1 (note covid-19 is literally SARS v2) this is precisely how the virus emerged. China's response was, as now, to only briefly close these horrific places of animal torture. The world remained silent and no pressure was put upon them to change this. We already had our warning.
They additionally covered up the outbreak and punished those who reported it. Do not defend this either implicitly or explicitly. There are reports that, had they immediately reported it, we could have avoided 95% of worldwide cases. 1.5M * 0.95 is quite a lot of deaths to be directly responsible for isn't it?
As I said in another comment, it is very possible another pandemic could break out even if China did everything they could to prevent it. But to ignore serious points of vulnerability which indeed caused a previous outbreak and then to try to cover it up is unforgivable. There is a genuine case for that being considered at the very least a crime against humanity if not an act of war given the consequences.
>... Also, it became incredibly clear to anyone that was paying attention that COVID was a serious threat in January. Yet, most of the western world collectively sat on its hands for the next month and a half. Will your historians also leave a few chapters on the subject of just how incapable our societies are at dealing with epidemics?
China told the WHO there was no human-to-human transmission in January as per their famous tweet. And it came out later evidence to the contrary came not from Chinese authorities but in fact WHO representatives on the ground. So believing the WHO and China is part of why.
No question most countries utterly fucked this up however, and there is much to improve, but to ignore the totalitarian, evil government responsible for many millions of deaths and who harvest organs and put people in concentration camps and to do the whole 'oh but you'd never say that about the USA lol' thing is really not on. I would be just as firm on any country responsible and if they did not do EVERYTHING in their power to prevent and mitigate this I would castigate them, even if it were my own country.
In China doing that gets you disappeared. Remember that and remember the privilege you have to disagree with me. The Chinese do not have that luxury.