Link, text of the article below with me highlighting the only important bit.
NEW YORK, Jan 25 (Reuters) - The Central Intelligence Agency has assessed that the COVID-19 pandemic is "more likely" to have emerged from a lab rather than from nature, an agency spokesperson said on Saturday.
The agency had for years said it could not conclude whether COVID-19 was the result of a lab incident or it originated in nature. But in the final weeks of the Biden administration, former CIA Director William Burns asked CIA analysts and scientists to make a clear determination, stressing the pandemic's historical significance, according to a senior U.S. official.
The CIA says it has "low confidence" in its assessment that a "research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely" and notes in its statement that both scenarios - lab origin and natural origin - remain plausible.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It was unclear the extent to which the agency has collected new intelligence on COVID-19's origins and whether that new evidence was used to formulate the latest assessment.
China’s government says it supports and has taken part in research to determine COVID-19’s origin, and has accused Washington of politicizing the matter, especially because of efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate.
Beijing has said claims that a laboratory leak likely caused the pandemic have no credibility. In an interview with Breitbart following his confirmation by the U.S. Senate on Friday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said one of his first priorities was getting his agency to make a public assessment on the pandemic's origins.
“That’s a day-one thing for me," he said. "I’ve been on record as you know in saying I think our intelligence, our science, and our common sense all really dictate that the origins of COVID was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
There are actually some people in China who believe that COVID was a conspiracy weaponized to destroy China’s economy.
Since the central government allowed local governments to officially issue government bonds (debt) back in 2014, many local governments - which already saw increasing debt burden back then - had jumped on a property investment scheme, took out huge loans and banked on the property developers building new cities so the local governments can profit off selling the land with rising value in 10 years. They were betting on the land premium rising by so much by 2025 that it could pay off their outstanding debt.
Then COVID came in 2020 and crashed everything - consumption was driven down, people unwilling to invest their savings, and the property sector boom was over by 2021 (in some cities, prices have fallen by as much as 40% by 2024 - it’s so over). Local governments had to take on strenuous debt to finance the measures taken against COVID, which decimated their budgets and many of them have since been saddled in outrageous amounts of debt (in Heilongjiang, for example, 500-600% of their GDP) with no easy way out.
Figure: Provincial GDP contribution (gray bars) is highly uneven, with most of the economy concentrated in the coastal manufacturing regions in Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shandong, Zhejiang (left four). Blue line shows the debt to GDP ratio and many of the poorer regions have exceptionally high debt burden (e.g. Yunnan (云南), Guangxi (广西), Heilongjiang (黑龙江) all having 500-700% debt to GDP ratio). Only Shanghai has less than 100% debt to GDP ratio.
Extremely good timing if you want to engineer an economic downturn in China. You can get very conspiratorial about it but chances are the pandemic likely happened due to factors including climate change coupled with poor sanitary measures.
If it really came from fort Dietrick it isn't even this crazy, the timing of it exactly match with when US started intensifying propaganda and economic war on China and US is known to use biological weapons in multiple countries.
Frankly, my conclusion to your explanation is that all members of those local governments who voted to so carelessly gamble the lives of their citizens should be executed.
I'm sorry, maybe I'm misunderstanding, but are you suggesting that an institution taking on debt in a crisis is "gambling with people's lives"? Cus, like, debt is bad... but also... at the end of the day it's just a made up number in a spreadsheet. Like, there's plenty of real examples of governments gambling with people's lives during the start of COVID, and they blow "taking on a little debt" out of the fukcing water.
The property investment 'gambling' was pre-covid, according to xiaohongshu's comment. I assume that's what they're referring to
seems like they took on the debt to do things and those things were... properly react to a pandemic? I'm not sure if you misunderstood something or I did