I'm not sure I ever bought that the Wuhan link was a 'conspiracy theory' but did loosely agree with the idea that for a certain time it didn't matter on the source, we just had to be totally focused on dealing with it. Now that many countries feel under control, full investigation into this needs to happen and if it can be proven that this is the leak (what are the odds of this being a coincidence?!) then sanctions need to rain down on China. 3.7 million dead.
Hmm so you want to cause suffering to 1.6 billion people due to mistakes made by a handful (if it is ever proven, that being highly unlikely for multiple reasons) ? Though your comments seem to want to give a free pass to those that could have saved thousands of lives but didn't? Unlike the source that lack of action, and the resulting deaths, is proven.
We can get even further into the discussion that Covid is far worse than it needed to be because of the reticence of most nations to carry out effective measures (for example those that did have been affected the least : Taiwan, South Korea, China, NZ, Australia - though I accept there are some benefits to some of those nations from geographical location and/or population size).
Even though senior officials in the West knew of the outbreak within days/weeks of the outbreak (e.g. Trump was briefed on but totally ignored dozens of security briefs going back to Nov. 2019). He clearly wasn't the only one.
The president claimed in late February that coronavirus cases would soon “be down to close to zero,” and predicted, “like a miracle, it will disappear.” By the time the president told Americans on March 10, “Just stay calm. It will go away,”
From that warning in November, the sources described repeated briefings through December for policy-makers and decision-makers across the federal government as well as the National Security Council at the White House. All of that culminated with a detailed explanation of the problem that appeared in the President’s Daily Brief of intelligence matters in early January, the sources said. For something to have appeared in the PDB, it would have had to go through weeks of vetting and analysis, according to people who have worked on presidential briefings in both Republican and Democratic administrations. "The timeline of the intel side of this may be further back than we’re discussing," the source said of preliminary reports from Wuhan. "But this was definitely being briefed beginning at the end of November as something - pandemics - the military needed to take a posture on."
BTW were these countries ever 'punished' for their indiscrepancies / outbreaks ? It's only fate and luck some of these weren't a previous Covid global pandemic.
H1N1 virus (USA)
(H1N1) pdm09 (USA)
Aids (USA, if you believe the conspiracy theorists) (an estimated 32 million people have died from HIV since the disease was first recognised).
Nipah Virus (Malaysia) - the absolute worst, no cure, kills within a week.
Ebola - Central Africa, butchering primates.
Marburg Virus (Germany)
Smallpox (Europeans - historians estimate 90% of the native population of the Americas died from smallpox introduced by European explorers). In the 20th century alone, smallpox killed 300 million people.
Spanish Flu (started in the USA and killed an estimated 50 million)
SARS - China
MERS - Middle East
Or how about the ecocide in Vietnam (USA)
The Rainbow Herbicides showered over the jungles of Southeast Asia included Agent Blue, Purple and Pink, but Orange accounted for more than half of the nearly 20 million gallons of deadly chemicals used by the U.S. military between 1961 and 1971.
The cost to human life was horrifying and the large-scale destruction of the region’s environment led to the coinage of the word “ecocide.”
How about Bhopal (caused by an American company)
In what is considered the world’s worst industrial catastrophe, 32 tons of deadly chemical gases leaked into the city of Bhopal, India, on Dec. 3, 1984, and an estimated 9,000 people died immediately from the invisible, airborne poison. The final death toll over the ensuing weeks has been estimated at 20,000 and hundreds of thousands of residents suffered permanent injuries. Today, the Union Carbide plant, the site of the disaster, remains a toxic waste site contaminating the groundwater in Bhopal.
I haven't even touched on Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez (and other spills), rape of the Amazon and the human fallout of countless wars, historical and modern. Etc.
