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China Has Withheld Samples of a Dangerous Flu Virus (nytimes.com)
For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld lab samples of a rapidly evolving influenza virus from the United States -- specimens needed to develop vaccines and treatments, according to federal health officials, The New York Times reports. From the story: Despite persistent requests from government officials and research institutions, China has not provided samples of the dangerous virus, a type of bird flu called H7N9 [Editor's note: the link maybe paywalled; alternative source]. In the past, such exchanges have been mostly routine under rules established by the World Health Organization. Now, as the United States and China spar over trade, some scientists worry that the vital exchange of medical supplies and information could slow, hampering preparedness for the next biological threat. The scenario is "unlike shortages in aluminum and soybeans," said Dr. Michael Callahan, an infectious disease specialist at Harvard Medical School. "Jeopardizing U.S. access to foreign pathogens and therapies to counter them undermines our nation's ability to protect against infections which can spread globally within days." Experts concur that the world's next global pandemic will likely come from a repeat offender: the flu. The H7N9 virus is one candidate.
Got to admit.... didn't see that one coming. Bravo, well played.
Nothing to worry about, with good nutrition the average American will survive.
Oh, don't be so dramatic. Sure, China won't share the specimens with us, but all we have to do is get one of our friends to ask for it....
Oh, wait.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The PRC has never "played well with others" when it comes to infectious diseases, their first instinct is to claim nothing is happening, see SARS, they exclude the ROC (Taiwan) from as much of the international health network as they can, it's what you expect from a government were politics trumps (heh) everything else, especially including human lives. They don't much care if they kill their own Han Chinese by the tens of millions, why would even they care about foreign devils?
If, as you claim, they're doing this to spite Trump, that just further proves that they always put politics ahead of human lives.
Just like his great negotiating skills have gotten Affordable Healthcare repealed, even with a majority in both the House and Senate.
And The Wall.
ayup.
The line "For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld lab samples of a rapidly evolving influenza virus from the United States" says the virus comes from the United States. What they mean is "For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld from the United States lab samples of a rapidly evolving influenza virus."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld lab samples...Now, as the United States and China spar over trade, some scientists worry that the vital exchange of medical supplies and information could slow... infections which can spread globally within days...Experts concur that the world's next global pandemic will likely come from a repeat offender: the flu.
See that intentional equivocation and correlation structure? Think of news like this as code to understand it.
The trade issues are short months old and this has been going on for over a year. The linking to a potential global pandemic within days. Classic salesmanship tactic of time pressure. Clearly intended writing to give the impression of something without directly saying it. So much bullshit hidden in the structure. So much propaganda.
Don't fall for propaganda. Don't post it here on slashdot.
Sounds like bio warfare to me, should sanction China,
If they won't share samples of infectious diseases than no Chinese nationals should be admitted to the US
Exactly this ... the US is pissing off friends and allies all over the place. And while most of them probably wouldn't withhold medical stuff, America has fewer friends these days they can count on ... because those friends are tired of being blamed for everything by the Cheeto in Chief.
I'm not actually surprised that China has said "fuck you" and decided not to play nicely.
I won't be surprised if other countries decide similar things.
This is one of those "be careful what you wish for" things. Trump is doing more damage to international relationships than will be easily remedied, so if suddenly other countries are a whole lot less enthusiastic about what the US wants, then we'll just get another bullshit cycle of Trump blaming everyone else.
At some point, if the diplomatic equivalent of "bummer dude, not my problem" happens, you'll know who to blame.
Unless the birds having the virus only live in China, the US virus hunters should have found this virus already.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
What we need is more walls to keep the birds from flying into this country and spreading flu.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
We should simply eliminate the involved Chinese officials.
If this turns out to be the next break out super-flu like the 1918 variety, every egg laying chicken in the world will be conscripted by every company in the world that can make flu vaccines so we maybe keep the death toll in the mere 100s of millions.
In the meanwhile, it's vital that the few research labs capable of mutating raw flu strains into ones that express the vital proteins while growing well in egg membranes get going. Especially since this is particularly difficult with avian flu strains, they're much more vicious towards chicken eggs.
This is why we should be investing more in modernizing flu vaccine manufacturing. If the next super flu is also highly infectious to chickens, they will be culled and burned.
This sounds like a job for James Bond.
#DeleteChrome
The PRC has never "played well with others" when it comes to infectious diseases, their first instinct is to claim nothing is happening, see SARS, they exclude the ROC (Taiwan) from as much of the international health network as they can, it's what you expect from a government were politics trumps (heh) everything else, especially including human lives. They don't much care if they kill their own Han Chinese by the tens of millions, why would even they care about foreign devils?
If, as you claim, they're doing this to spite Trump, that just further proves that they always put politics ahead of human lives.
If China asked the US for a sample of an infectious disease, would the US give it to China?
The PRC has never "played well with others" when it comes to infectious diseases, their first instinct is to claim nothing is happening, see SARS, they exclude the ROC (Taiwan) from as much of the international health network as they can, it's what you expect from a government were politics trumps (heh) everything else, especially including human lives. They don't much care if they kill their own Han Chinese by the tens of millions, why would even they care about foreign devils?
If, as you claim, they're doing this to spite Trump, that just further proves that they always put politics ahead of human lives.
Although it is true that the PRC has never really played nice with others (I do remember the SARS kerfuffle), it does not refute the fact that this ridiculous trade war is making a bad situation worse.
it's the year of the Twelve monkeys
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
They don't much care if they kill their own Han Chinese by the tens of millions, why would even they care about foreign devils?
My theory is this - China knows that if enough of their own population falls, they could be left vulnerable to invasion for regime change via outside sources. So if a pandemic takes them down, it's to their benefit the rest of the world become too debilitated to attempt such a move on China.
MAD = Mutually Assured Death
Life is not for the lazy.
Not really, Ebola, like this bird flue, is zoonotic, it's not adapted to us humans and kills us way too fast to spread widely and quickly, especially with minimum levels of isolation that e.g. Nigeria was capable of implementing.
A bird flu like this might be much worse, though, since it's spread by aerosols ... but it also might no be as easily caught by humans ... except if the PRC is doing their usual thing of trying to sweep cases under the rug, they're giving it a chance to adapt better to humans (e.g. hybridization when a human or pig gets both it and a normal to them strain of the flu), although that could decrease its lethality.
Hard for Europe to manufacture a vaccine when they do not have a sample of it either.
And wonderful attitude of yours. Great to see that you love killing ppl.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
BTW, most of the R&D done in clean energy comes from America.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That's what you get if you don't play nice. Ahwel you can thank Trump for that with his stupid decisions.
But there is no direct evidence linking China's actions with the trade dispute.
Do you have any reason to believe we wouldn't?
My Google and Bing fu wasn't good enough to find anything about this, but I can't recall ever hearing of such a case, we can be sure the usual suspects would scream about it, and there's also the minor detail that mainland China has been one of the biggest sources for novel diseases. Which has been true for a very long time, e.g. the Black Death is thought to have come from China.
Citation needed, seeing as how per the report the withholding started before the trade war. If they've been doing it for 5 years as others have claimed, you ought to be blaming Obama for starting it.
You have to be kidding me. You seriously think that virus are useless as weapons?
You obviously do not have a clue of what you are speaking of.
H7N9 has a 40% mortality rate. More importantly, if you spread around a nation fast, and have ppl getting sick at the same time, you will likely have a massive increase in nosocomial infections, which will lead to large amounts of death. Not 40%. Probably 60-70% (though some 30% from side infections).
And if you think that virus can do no harm, look into WWI as well as what ebola has done.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That is stupid. When the Chinese government falls it will be to a Chinese who becomes popular by blaming the existing Chinese government for it's failures, real or otherwise.
#butheremails
The USA seems to be ripping up treaties and trade deals too. The USA is hardly to be trusted either.
It's also a very slow process, and each egg produces at most 3 doses. I was appalled with 2 'p's when the FDA tried to deny Protein Sciences a licence with the excuse the old methods were good enough. They use modern biotech, splicing the relevant antigen coding DNA into ... whatever, insect? cells that grow well in bioreactors to quickly mass produce the antigens, as I recall something like 100,000 doses in each run. Something like what they're doing would be the only real hope if we were facing a true death plague.
yeah, what Trump is doing leaves a lot to be desired. The same is true of what W did.
Lately, it seems like AMerica is becoming like China.
However, if you are talking about trade deals, other than NAFTA, America has not broke any. Everything that Trump has done has not been constrained by treaties. Even with WTO, it has said that if there is more than a 10% difference in trade, that the disadvantaged nation can impose tariffs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This is why we should be investing more in modernizing flu vaccine manufacturing. If the next super flu is also highly infectious to chickens, they will be culled and burned.
We already have that.... One of them is a recombinant protein-based technique approved in 2013. As I understand it, the protein-based techniques are supposed to create a more consistent vaccine batch than eggs (due to the intermingling of egg DNA). Plus, some people are allergic to chicken eggs and are unable to take the flue vaccine created using the egg based techniques.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/protec...
Because they wouldn't be able to provide enough vaccine for their own country if it broke out in a big way, unless they've copied approaches like the one used by Protein Sciences?
You bet we'd provide the seed strains to grow in eggs to other counties if a worldwide pandemic broke out killing 100s of millions to billions of people, something we've been fearing since 1918. Of course, we'd first have to create those seed strains, which takes a long time to begin with for non-avian original strains, the avian ones obviously don't play well with chicken egg membranes.
For the PRC and our betters in the US, this has nothing to do with science, medicine, avoiding the possible deaths of 100s of millions to billions of lives, etc., the alpha and omega is politics. The usual stuff the PRC has always done with infectious diseases like SARS, and TDS here.
...you're suggesting that perhaps China is a SHITTY international actor, whose interests lie solely with its own people and geopolitical goals? /shock.
For all of you who think Pax Americana has been odious and oppressive, brace yourselves. You haven't the faintest idea what it's going to be like with a TRULY racist, TRULY self-interested, TRULY ethnocentric hegemon.
-Styopa
Replying to undo broken moderation. I selected "insightful" but it chose "redundant."
That's because we had so few cases (most in fact health workers evacuated from Africa, right? Was there even more than 1 secondary in the US?) we could actually treat them in the dozen or less beds in the 3 of the 4 facilities that can do this (the 4th was reserved for any healthcare workers in the first 3 who contracted it, which fortunately didn't happen).
If it gets dire in a First World country, you do essentially what the Third World does, pretend to treat it but isolate it, and let the chips fall where they may. Although as we're discovering, survivors can transmit for a long time, so we'd have to get even more strict with quarantine measures.
The point is that, while it wasn't "routine" (except this sort of thing actually is routine in Africa), it wasn't The Big One, more people get killed in a normal flu season, let alone a pandemic one. Because, you know, Ebola is not transmitted by aerosol.
A pandemic that's more like 1918, or worse, is what we're trying to forestall, with the PRC not cooperating at all for the last 5 years. Obviously because they knew Trump would be elected 3 years after it started breaking out in the PRC.
If US pharma ends up charging them more than they can afford while the European labs develop the field tests for half the price and end up manufacturing in China to boot?
Go suck a melon America. China doesn't owe you a living you bunch of free-loaders. Get off your iPhone and TV addictions and do something productive with your time like figuring out clean green energy or something you fat bastards.
Yours,
The rest of the world; Trump edition.
The US invents half the shit, including medicines, invented every year. ROW needs to be more like us, not the other way around.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
From memory, and what I was just able to look up, there's 3 or so labs in the US that do this, St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, New York Medical College in Westchester County (maybe the top place, or maybe they just get the best press since a woman runs it), and maybe the CDC, all mustache twirling evil non-profit academic labs.
Your worldview is severely stunted and parochial.
Deaths are linked to low weight (not enough fat to survive periods where it's a struggle to keep food down, and low energy to power the immune system) and other modern comforts and treatments.
This was a problem for everyone 100 years ago, and rural Asian (and other) areas today. It would be in China's interest to let the US or other countries develop a vaccine as they stand to lose many, many people.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Dissallow Chinese nationals from entering your country and prevent any travel to / from Mainland China until they decide to share their samples.
Until they provide said samples, their citizens ( and any tourists ) are basically transmission vectors.
TBH, scientific research that benefits the species as a whole really should play on a different playground than Politics and petty bickering.
Whoa, I sincerely hope you're correct, and the cytokine storm hypothesis for the lethality of the 1918 pandemic is wrong. Erk, assuming the accounts I've read are correct, how does this explain the 1918 strain preferentially killing the younger? Well, for that, there's the hypothesis that the older set had already survived a strain somewhat close to the 1918 one. And maybe the body weight one fits into it.
Experts say this is a very hard field, a common maxim is, "If you've seen one flu pandemic, you've seen one flu pandemic."
As for the PRC, and North Asian counties in general like Japan, the authorities would rather have millions of their own people die than to lose face. (For the latter country, see WWII, and at smaller scales the responses to the Kobe earthquake and JAL Flight 123.)
Heh, I don't think Russia or the US would cough those up, certainly not without a very good reason. But I don't think you really need them, the DNA has been sequenced and published (and that was controversial of course), it's thought to be not terribly hard to recreate from that, certainly for a reasonably advanced nation state. One reason after 9/11 we got ourselves back into position to inoculate every one in the country if it broke out.
For a terrorist or most communist nations, they do not care about own troops. They will sacrifice them gladly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Is there any truth to this, is there any verifiably third party corroborating evidence for this?
Yes, Ebola and flu are both zoonoses, but they are not obligately so. The majority of cases are due to human to human transmission. That's pretty much the template for an emergent infectious disease: they don't come from nowhere. They smolder away slowly in some isolated animal population for millennia, then suddenly hop onto a human migration path.
That's what happened to smallpox, which was an insignificant African rodent disease until around three thousand years ago, when evidence emerges for it in Egyptian human populations. Egyptian traders brought it into the Near East and possibly as far as India by 1500 years ago; by the 1st Century CE it was in China. Then a particularly virulent strain emerged in China a few centuries later. This kind of thing happens all the time in nature, but the more aggressive strain burns itself out. The difference here is that China had extensive trade connections that reached as far west as Rome and east to Melanesia, giving the more aggressive strain global scope. In the 8th cenutry it killed 1/3 of the population of Japan. From late Roman times to the middle ages it made periodic incursions into Europe, but only became endemic there after the Crusades.
Human trade tilts the evolutionary playing field in favor of aggressive infectious agents. Ebola never spread anywhere before 1976, but it must have been around. It just never had access to a network of cities with hundreds of thousands of people as it did in '76. When it took weeks to travel between villages or to cross the ocean, Ebola was never going anywhere. Today you can catch Ebola in the African bush and be in New York two days later, well before any symptoms emerge.
So while Ebola isn't something we should panic over, it's not an empty bogeyman either. The US needs forward defenses against such things, because Ebola is not the only one.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's also a very slow process, and each egg produces at most 3 doses. I was appalled with 2 'p's when the FDA tried to deny Protein Sciences a licence with the excuse the old methods were good enough. They use modern biotech, splicing the relevant antigen coding DNA into ... whatever, insect? cells that grow well in bioreactors to quickly mass produce the antigens, as I recall something like 100,000 doses in each run. Something like what they're doing would be the only real hope if we were facing a true death plague.
The FDA is a scam and everyone knows it. It's job is to protect their own jobs first, big pharmas profits second, and Americans a distant third. If they cared about helping Americans we would be able to buy drugs from Canada still.
It's definitely Trump's fault. Not all the spying, black-ops / covert wars etc since the beginning of time.
Requiem for the American Dream
The US fascist ogliarchy can't be trusted, no matter who is running the show Emphasis on "show"
Don't go there man Trump Derangement Syndrome knows no limits.
If that was allowed, then US drug companies would stop giving Canada's nationalized healthcare system discounts, they can well afford to lose whatever business that would cost for a population of 37 million in favor of the 335 million in the US. Especially seeing as how they and we would like to see them continuing to do drug R&D, which the US market supports since all these other wonderful government single payer systems demand prices just above the cost of goods.
But the problem 100% is with China for this shitty move. Look at USSR USA cooperation in space.
China is worse than Trump
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Or, maybe we could put all of those research grants, and patents they jack prices up for to better use. Instead of allowing a bunch of selfish assholes to demand tribute from the sick.
Healthcare can do without the profit motive, it will literally never run out of sick people to treat otherwise.
Canada has one of the highest drug costs in the world, so it isn't like we get much of a discount. The way things are going, we'll be back to pre-NAFTA and manufacturing our own drugs. That will get the pharmaceutical companies attention, which will turn on Trump. Right now they're trying to do the TPP bullshit, but with NAFTA instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Yeah, let's kill the Golden Goose, that trick always works!
Seriously, show us on the doll where the capitalist touched you, for you'd rather have millions of people die year in, year out, until, maybe, some day, Western Civilization manages to reappear, that let any one of them "demand tribute from the sick".
You specifically wish me dead, for without these vile profiteers spending billions and billions on drug research and development I'd be dead decades ago, or probably before starting grade school, pretty sure I was prescribed antibiotics for my one bought with pneumonia after playing around in the dirt too energetically. Hmmm, and my father as well, from his current problem, or back around 1950 plus or minus when he was injected every 4 hours with what had to be procaine penicillin to save him from pneumonia. Probably quite a few people you know. And I hope you've never been prescribed an antibiotic for an infection that would have otherwise killed you.
You socialists killed way more than 100 million people in the 20th Century, will you ever be satisfied?
H7N9 is just a general subtype of the influenza A species, here we're talking about a particular strain in the PRC. New strains are generated all the time, especially in the PRC where men, birds and pigs live in very close proximity, and after one of them causes a pandemic, it's subtype generally becomes a or the dominant subtype till there's another pandemic of another subtype. E.g. historically, the 1918 flu was H1N1, and the recent 2009 swine derived flu was also of that subtype. In between, H3N2 for example caused the 1968 pandemic, and became established alongside H1N1 (all this partly from memory and double checked a bit with Wikipedia). There are many, many other type A subtypes.
Like Google dropping their Don't be evil shtick, you won't find the word "nerd" on the front page, the About page, or the FAQ.
Breaking the largest trade block in the world by breaking treaties (as if Canada is a security threat) is something especially when the guy breaking them doesn't even know anything. He actually thinks Mexico is the US's largest trade partner and doesn't consider the huge advantage the US has with services negating the couple of percent advantage Canada has in material goods currently.
There's also the softwood treaty that America breaks regularly, driving up housing costs for Americans.
And then there is bringing the worst part of the TPP under NAFTA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I wouldn't be too sure about any thing the Realty TV personality in charge would do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The USA has not friends, at least in the current US diplomatic climate, only frenemies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and it will abuse any relationship for practically any reason, ego, greed, domination, have to repeat that one cause they said it out aloud, 'DOMINATION', yeah, friends don't dominate friends because we they do, they ain't friends and never have been.
The US lies so much, that well, people have stopped paying attention and working to reduce interaction to only when they have to. It's like over there, it's rotting under the weight of it's own corruption, just humour it, prop it up a little, so that it implodes gracefully, rather than explodes in conflict either internal or external.
If the US government asks nicely, I am sure the government of China will hand over information this time and if the US government asks nicely next time etc. no more worthless treaties with the US, they break them anyhow. Quite simply the US has become to chaotic for anything other than relations at a polite polite distance, any plots and schemes of impact thwarted as much as possible, a propped up a little so the collapse is more subdued.
The US has become the drug addled, brain damaged prize fighter, to dumb to quit and only brain damage feeds the desire to fight and lose, again and again and again and the drugs, the corruption, creates the illusion of winning. So the rest of the world might well treat the US like an idiot toddler on a sugar rush with loaded gun, let it pretend it owns everything but stop it from breaking things whilst keeping it calm enough to not start pulling the trigger, eventually it will sugar crash on it's own after it's sugar supply has been cut off (that would be the funny money US dollar).
The US blaming everyone else for it's failings but it is all down to failure to prosecute corruption at all levels, that weight of corruption, collapsing the fabric of the US socio-economic system.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Perhaps Japan can or is sharing some of theirs: http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news...
started
most human infections were in people who'd had contact with live poultry or visited markets where the birds were sold.
Why not read the article instead of relying on your 'secret sources'
Please don't give it to Trump.
What was the name of this treaty by the way? Sounds interesting.
Why are you still much dirtier than Europeans then?
Sounds fishy, do you have a link for that claim?
The Steel and aluminium taffifs are against the WTO rules.
What 10% difference bullshit are you talking about Windy? You never found it the last few times you claimed it was a rule.
in Asia - 766 cases were reported, almost all in China
So ask the countries that weren't China for their samples.
How about the rest of your silly claims
It's the main flu virus for the year...and it's 40% fatal. Lets check here . 5-20% of Americans get the flu each year. Lets assume its the same for China. so 5-20% of Chinese people get it and it's 40% fatal. So 2% - 8% of the population, 28 million to 112 million Chinese people, died from flu just this year, and the government kept it a secret?
Half that number again infected who didn't die, many of them travelling the world and you couldn't get a sample?
I don't believe it is Trump causing the friends of the U.S. to think twice, it is the fact that a significant portion of the U.S. electorate support el Presidente Tweetie that has them concerned. They now realize just how stupid the U.S. electorate can be and that problem is not going be fixed soon. There's no fixing stupid (to reuse a Ron White phrase).
More likely than your conspiracy imagination is that the many flus start in S. China where contact between humans and animals is less than sterile...pigs and chickens. The PRC, knowing they have no real legitimacy, is reluctant to allow that sort of bad press come out if they can avoid it. The fact that those diseases could kill millions never enters into the calculation.
And they aren't worried about invasion. Japan cannot and wouldn't want China. Russia cannot even manage their own country. There is no one else. Also, there isn't much China has that anyone wants except access to their domestic markets. And no invasion could supply that.
I know. The treaties he has broken is with our 2 most important trade partners ;Canada and Mexico. And accusations against Canada, a 5 eye partner and one of most trusted allies, just insane.
All I can say is I hope Mueller gets more than enough to put him prison for rest of life.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Just like the 1918, 1976 (Ford's swine flu), 1977 (best guess from a Russian biolab), and 2009 H1N1 strains were "the same exact shit"? And the annual Northern hemisphere vaccine strains were Brisbane/59/2007 before the 2009 pandemic, then for it and many following years California/7/2009, and then last year Michigan/45/2015?
You know nothing about the science.
The US when Obama was president didn't ask nicely from 2013 to 2016? No one else in the world has asked the PRC nicely? The Europeans for example also make flu vaccines, some of their firms are the biggest in the world at doing that, like France's Sanofi. When looking for US seed strain producing labs, I also noted there are 1 or more in the U.K.
And producing seed strains now is one of the most important things that can be done, it normally takes a long time, hybridizing the original strain with ones that grow well in chicken egg membranes so they aren't pathogenic but express the 2 important original strain antigens, which is particularly hard with avian original strains since they tend to attack other bird cells.
Ignore the propaganda slant the NYT put on the issue and focus on a) this being a 2013 strain and b) this being a world wide issue if it breaks out. The PRC is treating this like SARS, it's a political issue were their leaders would rather have 100s of millions to billions of people die than to lose face.
It's influenza, it's very hard to keep it from spreading, in 1918-9 even to the most remote Pacific islands. However we'd get warning if the PRC instituted a mass inoculation effort, that's the obvious heads up if any county is about to try a genocide the rest of the world with an infectious bioweapon. Their economy also take a bit of a hit, plus they'd lose a lot of their people from starvation when they couldn't import crude oil and food.
Oh, and if they succeeded in this? Depend on Russia, and likely the US joining them in turning most of urban mainland China into radioactive glass, and using dirty bombs upwind of as much of the rural population possible. Which is why countries don't try to pull this shit, we're worried about the PRC doing this accidentally to save face, no sir, no SARS to see here!.
So you don't know that Americans can't actually do that "simply"? It's theoretically possible in "encouraged" sectors, requires a local "partner" for "restricted" sectors, and then there are the "forbidden" ones. With such a transparent motive, I can't imagine it being simple, but a quick check tells us that there are some.
But you're ignoring the whole point of the article, if you wait until it's a generally circulating super-flu epidemic in the PRC, it's too late, it's probably also circulating outside of the mainland, and only weeks from becoming a pandemic.
Even with modern technology it takes time to brew the antigens, purify the mess, bottle and test it, distribute it, a week or more for a vaccine recipient to get protected, etc. etc. etc. And we aren't geared up to do this for 100s of millions to billions of people. To do it with old egg technology ... forget about it, by the time you've developed seed strains, grown it in zillions of eggs (at most, 3 doses per egg), then go through the purification etc. process, most of the world will have been exposed to it, absent catastrophically stringent quarantine measures.
This was a problem for everyone 100 years ago, and rural Asian (and other) areas today. It would be in China's interest to let the US or other countries develop a vaccine as they stand to lose many, many people.
That assumes the Chinese leadership would be upset if hundreds of millions of Chinese died. But the fact is that they don't give one shit about human life in China, that's why you can get the death penalty for cheating on your taxes, and why they harvest the internal organs from those given the death penalty. Those organs are worth quite a bit of money, you see. All they care about is their own enrichment. And China's economic growth is slowing now, which means their middle class will stop growing. Growing economic prosperity is the only thing that's been keeping them from revolution, and now the growth has stopped. The only way to make sure that the living will have jobs is to kill many of them off. Letting a couple hundred million Chinese citizens die is a win-win for Winnie the Pooh.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For an in-depth read of the potential dangers of an influenza pandemic see: The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
by John M. Barry. Although medical science has certainly advanced since 1918 it is doubtful that we have overcome many of the social limitations that made the 1918 virus so deadly.
Although it is true that the PRC has never really played nice with others (I do remember the SARS kerfuffle), it does not refute the fact that this ridiculous trade war is making a bad situation worse.
That is like you and I getting into a spat about who owes who money, and me pulling out a Glock just daring you to say another word. No, the trade issues should be treated as completely unrelated, and that's all on China.
Just another day in Paradise