It does astonish me how poorly people understand different in _magnitude_ between offences and how quickly we get into whataboutism.

>If a similarly dangerous flu mutation jumps from a pig to an undocumented agricultural worker in the United States, and goes viral across the globe, will you also refer to that as 'unleashing a pandemic'?

Absolutely, why on earth would you think I wouldn't? I'm borderline offended by the implication and this subtle-not-so-subtle 'if you criticise x you're racist' narrative is dangerous nonsense. Refrain from it please.

>Animal rights advocacy groups have for decades been reminding us that conditions in modern farms are dangerous and unsanitary, so it's not like we don't have any advance warning for it.

Absolutely, and spillover from ecological incursions is a huge issue. I hope there is more emphasis put on the risks now. I recommend the book 'spillover' on this topic.

However it's vitally important to realise - some countries are at higher risk than others for various reasons, China being a HUGE flashpoint for this issue, and there ARE things we can do.

Wet markets are disgusting horrific places and also HUGELY risky from a spillover event perspective. In 2003 and SARS 1 (note covid-19 is literally SARS v2) this is precisely how the virus emerged. China's response was, as now, to only briefly close these horrific places of animal torture. The world remained silent and no pressure was put upon them to change this. We already had our warning.

They additionally covered up the outbreak and punished those who reported it. Do not defend this either implicitly or explicitly. There are reports that, had they immediately reported it, we could have avoided 95% of worldwide cases. 1.5M * 0.95 is quite a lot of deaths to be directly responsible for isn't it?

As I said in another comment, it is very possible another pandemic could break out even if China did everything they could to prevent it. But to ignore serious points of vulnerability which indeed caused a previous outbreak and then to try to cover it up is unforgivable. There is a genuine case for that being considered at the very least a crime against humanity if not an act of war given the consequences.

>... Also, it became incredibly clear to anyone that was paying attention that COVID was a serious threat in January. Yet, most of the western world collectively sat on its hands for the next month and a half. Will your historians also leave a few chapters on the subject of just how incapable our societies are at dealing with epidemics?

China told the WHO there was no human-to-human transmission in January as per their famous tweet. And it came out later evidence to the contrary came not from Chinese authorities but in fact WHO representatives on the ground. So believing the WHO and China is part of why.

No question most countries utterly fucked this up however, and there is much to improve, but to ignore the totalitarian, evil government responsible for many millions of deaths and who harvest organs and put people in concentration camps and to do the whole 'oh but you'd never say that about the USA lol' thing is really not on. I would be just as firm on any country responsible and if they did not do EVERYTHING in their power to prevent and mitigate this I would castigate them, even if it were my own country.

In China doing that gets you disappeared. Remember that and remember the privilege you have to disagree with me. The Chinese do not have that luxury.