I read The Dead Hand, which was mostly nukes, but touched on bio plenty to leave a lasting impression.

Dead Hand is policy. Biohazard is bureaucracy. Dead hand is John Toland, Biohazard is Joseph Heller.

Bioweapons are worse tactically and strategically than nukes, so the fact the the Soviets had a program up to and perhaps beyond the collapse of the empire says way more about their bureaucracy and decision making than it does about their military prowess.

I thought about that one a lot. It took a few more books for me to come up with the theory that the Soviets knew down to their very bones that they were absolutely 100% fucked in any nuclear exchange, knew down to their very bones that the Capitalists were going to go for it any minute, and knew that no amount of deterrence was going to keep them out of the shit so they might as well take out as much humanity as they can.

It's all I got. You don't get as balls deep in biowar as the Soviets did without some real fatalism.

China is a lot of things but they're not stupid enough to have a bioweapons program,

Oh fuck yeah they are. Remember: the only humans on earth are the Han Chinese.

China has a number of civilian and military facilities that could be associated with an offensive BW program. For example:

• The Chinese Ministry of Defense’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS) Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology (IME) in Beijing is acknowledged as a biodefense research facility.

• The Lanzhou Institute of Biological Products (LIBP) has been identified as a vaccine producer. We believe that LIBP has several BL-3 laboratories and dual use capabilities.

From 1993 to the present, military scientists have published in open literature the results of studies of aerosol stability of bacteria, models of infectious virus aerosols, and detection of aerosolized viruses using polymerase chain reaction technology. Such advanced biotechnology techniques could be applicable to the development of offensive BW agents and weapons. Facilities in China that may have legitimate public health and commercial uses could also offer access to additional BW-enabling capabilities.

Now - that's not to say that COVID is a deliberate agent. But the Biological Weapons Convention allows errrrrrrrrrbody to do pretty much whatever cockamamie "defensive" research they want. The USSR was "defensively" cooking up something like 2000 tons of anthrax a year, for example. What I love is the massive influx of probiotics in the late '90s early '00s are a direct consequence of the industriousness of the Soviet biowarfare program goin' all swords to plowshares. No Dannon Activia without Vektor - they had a couple strains that were literally named after the first researchers that accidentally killed themselves with them.

and they're doubly not stupid enough to have a bioweapons program at a facility that was receiving US government funding.

I dunno man the whole point of "wolf warrior diplomacy" is "they won't take you seriously if you aren't an aggressive dick." Nonetheless:

This is sloppiness all the way down. Fauci knows it, and Collins knows it. They're just too chickenshit to say anything about it.

So here's the question: what would you do? 'cuz I think we're at that point where we're starting to recognize we gotta do something about China... but we're also recognizing that there's nothing lightweight to do about China.

Historically speaking, this is why we kick the can down the road.