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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1774 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 23, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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I was thinking back to 5 years ago, when Covid was still mostly (in the U.S., at least) considered a China problem. I remember seeing videos all over Reddit of people dropping dead in the streets, apartment complexes being weld-locked shut, etc.

Obviously this doesn't reflect the U.S.-lived version of the pandemic, but I never heard anything more about these videos. Were they ever officially debunked as Chinese propaganda, or even addressed at all?

The doors welded (or more commonly locked and bolted) shut were real. Reportedly this was all due to overzealous local officials rather than due to central CCP policy, but central CCP policy included "sending Covid-positive people to massive quarantine camps, forcibly if necessary", and it looks like they didn't back off on the camps or denounce the local paranoia until after protests in 2022, so I doubt they actually opposed the craziness. I also don't think it was deliberate propaganda, but "if only the emperor knew" has been a popular sentiment for hierarchical governments to passively exploit for millennia - you can get all the repression you want but without all the blowback you don't want, if you just let overzealous underlings do it for you and then don't interfere until or unless they go way too far.

The "dropping dead in the streets" videos I remember (and found again in a search), but I'm not sure they need addressing. There are a lot of things that can lead to someone fainting. My wife collapsed in the grocery store once just by pushing herself too hard near our first baby's due date, and a country full of old people trying to push themselves past the "996 working hour system" is likely to take a few similar casualties that you'd similarly never hear about ... except in the context of an uncertain new virus. It doesn't take a propagandist for a paranoid official to decide "just be safe, don't approach the person who fell without protection", nor for a bystander to decide "quick get a video of the guys in hazmat suits going for that collapsed person", nor for someone seeking fake internet points to decide "I can go viral with a scarier title, I'm not waiting for a death certificate". "If it bleeds it leads" is still modern news policy, it's just decentralized policy now.

The "dropping dead in the streets" videos I remember (and found again in a search), but I'm not sure they need addressing. There are a lot of things that can lead to someone fainting.

Back when I finally got Covid in the summer of 2022, I made the mistake of engaging briefly in some light exercise over two weeks later. As a result I could barely get out of bed the next day. Covid was unique at least to me in having such a profound effect on my stamina for a long time compared to the actual symptoms themselves (two days of fever and a couple more of general malaise). I can easily see myself fainting if I'd had to push myself to do anything physical then. I remember that just carrying two slightly heavy bags some 20 meters a week after the initial symptoms left me completely winded.

I had the same thing. I got COVID three times, and by the end of all of that my stamina was at an all time nonexistent.

If we assume said videos were real, there's an ominous implication to take away from that; There were multiple versions of Covid being cooked in said bioweapons lab it escaped from, some of which were far more nasty than we want to contemplate, the Chinese knew it had escaped somehow, but they didn't know which version had escaped.

Hence the Chinese acting as if they were dealing with a zombie outbreak occurring, and not some new variant of the flu.

...of course, this is all just my personal conspiracy theory. Take it with a heap of salt.

Covid would have been an insane design for a bioweapon, for the same reason a nuclear hand grenade would be a horrible thing to issue to infantry. Weapons are supposed to incapacitate the enemy while not harming the user, or at least not risking the user nearly as much. Airborne high-R0 pathogens don't work as bioweapons unless you've got a (nearly) sterilizing vaccine ready before release, not a 90%-effective vaccine ready more than a year later. The ~0.5% case fatality rate and the exponentially disproportionate harm to older people are also pretty lousy weapon design. I guess this might have been version 0.0.1, with flaws they hoped to fix after many more years of development?

they didn't know which version had escaped

This might be true, though, not because they were trying to run a bioweapon lab, but because sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has BSL-4 space, but also BSL-3 and BSL-2, and was doing coronavirus gain-of-function (wait, apologies to Fauci, I of course merely mean aingay-of-unctionfay) research in the latter. Even if Covid-19 was a natural zoonotic disease, the first attempt to investigate it would have revealed that a leak of something was a possibility, and the options at that point would be "assume it might be something nasty" or "assume that everybody who might have accidentally released something nasty has been utterly forthright about their potentially-huge mistakes", the latter of which would ironically itself have been a potentially-huge mistake.

You're assuming COVID in this scenario was the intended bioweapon and not an intermediate they were e.g. gene-harvesting.

I remember the people dropping dead videos as well. Was one of the first things I have ever seen mentioning Covid when a friend shared one of those in a group chat. Entirely forgotten and memory holed

My darkest conspiracy theory is:

  • those were the vaccinated
  • they’d developed the vaccine with the virus
  • the heart attacks were a known side effect
  • the big delay in getting the already-existing vaccine out was twofold: to tweak the formula to reduce the vax heart attacks to a level less than the worst strain of the bioweapon, and to have lockdowns until Trump “lost.”

I put my pattern recognition at 10% likelihood because I’ve lost most trust in the fed gov being able to pull off a scheme like that.

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