China doesn't want to be blamed for the pandemic and our media has been happy to cooperate.
The media is nothing if not flexible:
For the past year, our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press have insisted it’s a lunatic conspiracy theory to speculate that COVID-19 might have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But suddenly they’ve all reversed themselves, and now they’re admitting that a lab leak is not only possible but probable.
And of course:
We’ve been scolded for calling it “the Wuhan virus” or “the Chinese virus,” which is what everybody on the news was calling it in the early days of the pandemic, until somebody told them to stop[.]"
China insisted that identifying the location of the origin, as has been routinely done since we started identifying virus sources, was racist when applied to them. I wonder why? Especially when all the variants of the pandemic virus are identified by country. Why is one country treated so differently?
I actually don't wonder why that is true so much. What I wonder about is why our media went along.
Oh:
[Everything] the Chinese Communist Party has said and done since that initial outbreak has been dishonest. It’s not racist to say so, and you’re not a conspiracy theorist for paying attention. The only people who tell you so, Hollywood and the media, are literally getting paid by China.
Optimist that I am, apparently the CCP can only rent our news and entertainment industries. And the lease expires after about 15 months, it seems:
The Biden administration has called on the World Health Organization to conduct a second investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic amid a renewed push for one from both scientists and politicians.
Fingers crossed. Still, I worry that letting the China-compliant WHO investigate is just a way of subcontracting ignoring the true origin to a group less likely to blow the whistle on the CCP.
Socialism with Chinese characteristics has always claimed to be a superior version of the ideology and in the last 30 years might even have seemed so. As we learn more about the realities rather than the fiction Beijing and its enablers in the West want us to believe, who would be so confident that Chinese Marxism will manage a better fate?
You wonder why I've called this the Xi Jinping Flu? China's role in turning an epidemic into a pandemic was disturbing even if we can't verify the lab leak.
And again, let me note that I do not think China set out to deliberately attack the world. It was likely the result of incompetence and secrecy in the CCP system. Although I can't rule out the possibility that the CCP actively decided that it wasn't going to suffer alone once it realized it was loose in China.