Related theory is that they’re planning for a more dangerous disease to be released in the future, either accidentally or on purpose, and they feel the need to perfect their zero-[disease] protocol now. They can’t accept a superficial failure with covid because that means accepting a critical failure with the next thing, especially if they’re not so good at making vaccines.
Why the heck would they want to do that, considering how much COVID is clearly costing them? I don’t see any rational actor looking at the situation and being like “what we need right now to invigorate the economy is a more deadly virus”…
Practically, the Chinese government’s response to their biosafety people is: ‘You shouldn’t do that dangerous research in biosafety II labs the way you did in Wuhan. To get you to stop doing that, we give you a lot of money to build a lot of biosafety III and biosafety IV labs’.
Without openly admitting that there was a lab leak in Wuhan, they might not see other moves that are currently viable.
The problem with that policy is that the researchers in those biosafety III and biosafety IV labs are likely going to want to do dangerous prestigious work. There are strong pressures to create research results and China does not know how to teach their researchers safety culture.
It’s plausible that there are people high up in the Chinese party who do think there’s a good likelihood that there will be more screw-ups and lab leaks in the future because they don’t trust the biosafety people but who don’t see another path to take.
I can’t speak for the other commenter, but ‘planning for’ might have been intended in the sense of ‘planning to respond to’ (or at least to have been ambiguous between that and the more sinister meaning)
Related theory is that they’re planning for a more dangerous disease to be released in the future, either accidentally or on purpose, and they feel the need to perfect their zero-[disease] protocol now. They can’t accept a superficial failure with covid because that means accepting a critical failure with the next thing, especially if they’re not so good at making vaccines.
Why the heck would they want to do that, considering how much COVID is clearly costing them? I don’t see any rational actor looking at the situation and being like “what we need right now to invigorate the economy is a more deadly virus”…
Practically, the Chinese government’s response to their biosafety people is: ‘You shouldn’t do that dangerous research in biosafety II labs the way you did in Wuhan. To get you to stop doing that, we give you a lot of money to build a lot of biosafety III and biosafety IV labs’.
Without openly admitting that there was a lab leak in Wuhan, they might not see other moves that are currently viable.
The problem with that policy is that the researchers in those biosafety III and biosafety IV labs are likely going to want to do
dangerousprestigious work. There are strong pressures to create research results and China does not know how to teach their researchers safety culture.It’s plausible that there are people high up in the Chinese party who do think there’s a good likelihood that there will be more screw-ups and lab leaks in the future because they don’t trust the biosafety people but who don’t see another path to take.
I can’t speak for the other commenter, but ‘planning for’ might have been intended in the sense of ‘planning to respond to’ (or at least to have been ambiguous between that and the more sinister meaning)