almost as if China wanted COVID to spread

Alt-media commenter Styx has a theory: China engineered the COVID virus as a way to pare down its demographic problem: too many old people weighing too heavily on its elder-care network. Why not kill off a few million (we still don't know true COVID numbers in China)? Well, the virus did and does still attack the old and those with certain comorbidities (obesity, lung problems, etc.); it's actually a fairly narrow demographic that can be killed by the virus when you think about it. Almost as if the virus were engineered.

Anyway, The Epoch Times has an article saying

EXCLUSIVE: China Stonewalled US Offer of COVID-19 Assistance During Early Days of Pandemic, Emails Show

Here's a long excerpt:

Three days after Beijing officially acknowledged a cluster of an unknown pneumonia disease in 2020, then-head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Robert Redfield asked his Chinese counterpart George Gao to get on the phone.

“I’ve been trying to reach you and will try again in a few hours,” he wrote, according to emails obtained by The Epoch Times. It was Jan. 3, 2020.

This would be the first of a series of efforts from the United States to engage with China and offer assistance over the next few weeks.

“Unfortunately, that assistance wasn’t accepted by the Chinese government,” Redfield later recounted. “I think it could have made a big difference.”

Redfield said he had “extensive discussions” with Gao in the early days of the pandemic and that a team of 20 people was ready to fly across the world.

Gao personally refused the offers, citing a lack of authorization, according to one report.

A review of the files The Epoch Times obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request and the public statements offers another glimpse into how China was stonewalling the United States during the early days of the pandemic. All the while, the communist regime was suppressing information about the outbreak domestically when any health data would have been crucial to formulate a more effective COVID-19 containment strategy and minimize the disease’s global spread.

[...]

Ultimately, the United States and allies, during the early stages of the pandemic, made nearly 100 requests to ask for assistance or offer help, all of which were rejected by Chinese authorities, according to David Asher, the former lead COVID-19 investigator at the U.S. State Department.

Chinese officials at the same time had been aggressively suppressing information inside China. While Redfield spoke with Gao in one of the calls, local police in Wuhan summoned Chinese doctor Li Wenliang, one of a string of Chinese medical professionals who tried to sound the alarm about the danger of a new pneumonia-like virus, and accused him of “rumor-mongering.”

Li ended up passing away after contracting COVID-19 on Feb. 7, the same day Azar reiterated Washington’s readiness to provide on-the-ground help.

The U.S. CDC had no access to direct data from China. More COVID-19 cases began emerging in America. No U.S. experts were invited on the WHO team that arrived in China on Feb. 10 that year.

A WHO probe into the virus origin eventually happened a year later, under mounting international pressure and the close supervision of Chinese researchers. Two U.S. scientists were on board, including Clifford Lane, deputy director at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It was the first time government-affiliated U.S. scientists were allowed into China since the COIVD-19 pandemic.

By that time, all viral traces had long been destroyed in Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, the site linked to the cases officials first identified. The WHO panel was similarly denied access to raw data on early cases.

The revelation that the US was itself complicit in the spread of this pandemic by funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab during the Obama administration doesn't soften my attitude toward what China did and continues to do (e.g., Shanghai lockdowns, zero-COVID policy), but it does make me realize there's plenty of blame to go around, including in my own country. This whole thing has been one huge comedy of errors and idiocy on multiple levels, involving China, the US, the WHO, and a host of other countries whose responses to the pandemic proved to be stupid beyond measure. Follow the science! I can't wait to see whether, with the next pandemic, we've learned any good lessons from all of this. 

Hopefully, I'll be dead by the next pandemic.