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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?
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.
This took me a second to think about, but I guess that is a distinct possibility. I was considering the "might have been version 0.0.1" case, where Covid-19 was an intermediate for a future coronavirus bioweapon, but it's not completely out of the question that someone could e.g. work on a single protein in one virus strain and splice it into a very different base virus.
Indeed, that's a large chunk of the way gain-of-function research tends to work in the context of bioweapon development. Make multiple different things, combine them together, and see what sticks.
See e.g. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1229455
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