Talk about straw men....we were not discussing the response. We know it was and, it appears continues to be, shit because Trump transported us back to 1860 "States Rights" time. That was not the point, apparently, of the 60 Minutes piece. We were discussing origination and future prevention by requiring the Commie bastards to actually require safe food handling protocols as a price of being part of the international community.
I have no issue with saying we should be pushing on the Chinese - the whole world really - to adapt their cultural norms to modern standards. Hell, I live in SF where we had to beat up on some local politicos of Chinese descent who were trying to defend Shark Fin Soup, which has little real value but was decimating the shark population with fins being sheared off sharks who were then dumped back to die in the sea.
The problem is when THIS WAS ZOMG CHINAS FAULT becomes a strawman very easily used to distort the reality that we really screwed up the response - which would have been hard work but not very complicated to get right. This becomes more pernicious when the tenor of that blame starts to point at the upper levels of Chinese Government that is running a country with over a Billion people most of whom are in 3rd world/undeveloped situations.
People in Appalachia are eating squirrels and possums and who knows what. Risk exists there too. The scope is far larger in China, so it's not too shocking that China is where the humans lost the pandemic lotto.
But when you get down to it, a lot of bad shit will happen worldwide. Viruses have large scale impact but we have huge portions of the US population with substandard sewage - just being dumped into waterways. People who just burn their trash despite it containing lots of toxics. This happens on the corporate level too, when you look at things like the BP oil disaster or a cargo ship blocking the Suez Canal.
I'm more optimistic in many of these cases about us being able to craft responses than trying to figure out how to track down what 7 billion humans are up to on a micro level.
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