michael, the very term “the Chinese” is misleading. Such terms, “the Chinese”, “the English”; they’re in common use, but they mash separate things together, like some national government, the people currently living within a certain national border, people from within that border but now living elsewhere, and people descended or partly descended from people in that place, wherever they live.
Really, all of us are just people, and each of us lives somewhere partly controlled by some government.
I think that SARS-CoV-2 may have escaped from a biolab, but that’s really nothing to do with “the Chinese”; neither the people nor the government. The people in China suffered horribly with covid-19. The Chinese government did some things wrong, and many things right. They release propaganda like this:
in which they mention all the things they did right, and omit the things they did wrong, like trying to silence the doctors who raised the alarm, and welding the doors closed on apartment blocks during the Wuhan lockdown. I quite like that piece of propaganda, because the US administration has been spectacularly stupid over this.
Did you read the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ link, “Threatened pandemics and laboratory escapes: Self-fulfilling prophecies”?
Lab escapes are nothing new; it’s just that this particular virus (if it is an escape; we don’t know) spreads really fast. It’s just a coincidence.
First, we have to mop this up, and heavy restrictions are the way to do that. Then we should do two things. The UK should declassify Exercise Cygnus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Cygnus
and implement proper pandemic precautions, as should all other countries. Covid-19 could have been contained and suppressed if every government had been prepared, and had implemented precautions when the WHO raised the alarm. And biolabs must be secured and regulated internationally.
Countries, especially the powerful Western countries must start respecting the UN.