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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30778 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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I maintain that the Chinese think this was a biowarfare attack against them. They're using COVID to screen for their biological counterattack.

  1. Dodgy US NGO Ecohealth was messing around with chimeric coronaviruses in Wuhan - 'loses' their files on what viruses they had back in late 2019.

  2. China thinks the US used biowarfare against them in the Korean war, that's their official history.

  3. Conspiratorially minded Chinese elites aren't going to think 'oh it was just random chance: a sick Laotian bat flew to Wuhan and infected a pangolin who infected people'. They're not going to think an American NGO just happened to accidentally leak an extremely dangerous virus in a major Chinese city. Of course, Chinese BSL-4 biolabs are very well run and safe! Why wouldn't the leak happen in America if it were natural? Their most natural explanation is deliberate sabotage from the same country with a history of using biowarfare against them.

  4. They coped with the virus very well in the first two years, squelching it up until Omicron. Chinese death figures are very low, nearly 1000x times less than the US. Even the Chinese can't lie that much.

Given these assumptions, doesn't it make sense to launch a biological counterattack? The US is 100-1000x more vulnerable than China to biowarfare. China has finished setting up all their totalitarian surveillance structure, they've got camps and everything ready. They're 'justified' on the basis that they think the US shot first. If they release something in America, they'll have the advantage of distance and time, something they lacked the first time.

Maybe the MSS is taking their time, ensuring no evidence leads back to China. It's difficult to make it look like an accident and ensure it's lethal enough to be useful. Maybe the Chinese vaccine industry is suffering delays - they have to prepare a vaccine for the new weapon along with their COVID vaccine work. That might explain China's weakness on that front - diversion of effort. The frontline troops for Taiwan will need to be immune to the People's Liberation Plague. Maybe the nuclear forces aren't quite ready - the new subs and missile siloes take time to field. There could be all kinds of things causing a hold-up.

In conclusion, I think Chinese zero-COVID is a rational strategy to buy time for biowarfare and create an excuse for their ultra-high level of readiness. A few small riots and some economic damage are nothing compared to knocking out the entire West in a single blow and securing hegemony in Asia.

They coped with the virus very well in the first two years, squelching it up until Omicron. Chinese death figures are very low, nearly 1000x times less than the US. Even the Chinese can't lie that much.

China absolutely can lie that much. And with such a large population, it's relatively easier to obfuscate deaths. And the west seemed motivated to INFLATE covid numbers, as well. Lots of deaths with COVID, rather than from COVID. Actual COVID deaths are probably somewhere inbetween.

And you might talk of excess deaths, but consider this; China has a lot more deaths of young people from accidents and such. When you lockdown, you have far fewer young people getting killed by machinery, run over in the street, things like that. China also isn't grappling with a drug epidemic. And the average person has a healthy BMI, even the elderly. China would have weathered COVID well regardless of how it handled things. By locking down and making it look like that drove their success, the west was doomed to follow. Telling overweight westerners to stay at home and do nothing was probably the biggest danger to their health.

Agree with @sarker. It seems that even if major powers develop bioweapons, the nuclear truce has held. Why are bioweapons different than nuclear weapons?

Sure you can have deniability, but if Covid-19 were an actual bioattack, it would be a laughably bad attempt. All it does is kill old people who are burden on the system - when China because of the One Child Policy will be hit the hardest by the demographic collapse. If anything Covid is great for China, as it kills older less productive people, and lets the young refill the ranks.

Maybe the nuclear forces aren't quite ready

What does this mean? Is China going to launch a plague, then launch nukes? I'd argue bioweapons only make sense as a deceptive attack, crippling the West before they can strike back with nukes or other superweapons.

Maybe the Chinese vaccine industry is suffering delays - they have to prepare a vaccine for the new weapon along with their COVID vaccine work. That might explain China's weakness on that front - diversion of effort.

This is a far more important argument than you give it credit for. The advantage right now for the US especially is a specialization in research of 'hard sciences,' with biology/medicine being a lucrative and prestigious field. Virology maybe not, but I'd be surprised if Western defense agencies didn't have a much better understanding of viruses than standard academia.

What does this mean? Is China going to launch a plague, then launch nukes? I'd argue bioweapons only make sense as a deceptive attack, crippling the West before they can strike back with nukes or other superweapons.

China doesn't quite have second-strike capability against the US at the moment. They can cause some damage certainly, but a lot of their arsenal could be taken out with a pre-emptive strike. This has implications on the credibility of threats and deterrence. China obviously would want a secure arsenal before taking any risky moves like invading Taiwan. Hence they are building missile siloes and a new class of missile submarines for 2024-25.

I'd be surprised if Western defense agencies didn't have a much better understanding of viruses than standard academia.

I would. Biology and medicine is a huge field, and the vast majority of the research is conducted either in the open (at universities etc., and published in public journals) or by private companies. The US military has some research capacity (Fort Detrick etc.), but it is tiny compared to "standard academia".

Sure you can have deniability, but if Covid-19 were an actual bioattack, it would be a laughably bad attempt. All it does is kill old people who are burden on the system - when China because of the One Child Policy will be hit the hardest by the demographic collapse. If anything Covid is great for China, as it kills older less productive people, and lets the young refill the ranks.

Honestly the biggest frustration of COVID is that it provided a convenient out for the biggest Demographic issue of most affluent states right now and yet every major economy dug the hole even colossally deeper instead of taking the short-term hit to fix their issues.

Last time you posted this (a month ago) I said I'd be happy to bet against a Chinese bioattack in the next year. You didn't take the offer, indicating that you think it's not going to happen in the next year. So when is this going to happen already?

The whole point is that we don't know whether it's a bioattack or not. There's plausible deniability. We live in a world where Daszak and the whole Ecohealth team have not even been arrested! How do you separate bioattack from lableak or natural evolution with great reliability? You can't. Let alone determining that it was Chinese specifically.

There is no plausible universe where I can say 'oh X plague has been proven to be a specifically Chinese bioattack, it's not just American propaganda or whatever else'. I can't get my money if I bet. And if I am right, the money isn't worth very much because we'll have bigger concerns like coughing our lungs out.

Okay, let's bet about a "plague" of any origin coming about in the next year.

If you want to be specific, I'd say 'novel disease kills 500K Westerners by the end of 2025' (about when the Chinese should've finished their preparations). That still excludes the chance that their biowarfare attempt squibs out or gets nipped in the bud. It also excludes them using another novel strain of COVID. I'm rather suspicious of how Omicron had such a huge genetic gap from Delta. What was it doing for those 18 months where it was barely evolving? Trapped in ice, in a lab somewhere?

This is a subject that is very opaque and hard to bet on. Imagine betting on 'US elections are rigged in favour of X'. If they're rigged properly, nobody will be able to prove it. And the definition of rigged can be very expansive, from intelligence agencies suppressing harmful stories to ballot harvesting to making up votes wholesale.

500k Westerners? Covid has killed a million Americans alone despite a 0.1% IFR. Most of the damage came from overreaction than the actual disease.

That's a piss poor bioweapon if there ever was one. If that's the most they can muster even in your imagination we've got nothing to worry about.

Well I was thinking about the time it would take to kill. COVID has been going for 3 years now.

Sure, but it's also a million deaths.

After the first covid death, the USA hit 500k dead in about a year. Again, with a 0.1% IFR.

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