Matt Pottinger isn't pushing this in order to advance his views on China. He's pushing this in order to try and launder his own reputation as part of a racist administration that lied repeatedly about the coronavirus.
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That's why I get particularly annoyed by people who ask me to ignore sloppy research or hysterical claims because 'we're on the same side.' There is no absence of evidence that China is a massive human rights abuser and an aggressively revisionist power. We don't need bullshit.
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Replying to @Pinboard
99% of the recent discussion around it is bullshit. The original claim remains exactly as plausible as it was a year ago; theoretically possible, extremely unlikely.
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer @Pinboard
any actual investigation of this - well, will be impossible because of Chinese intransigence, very obviously and foremostly - but is also extremely badly served by the people talking up non-stories as 'evidence' to promote it.
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
I think investigation has merit. When MH370 dropped into the ocean, we didn't say "oh well, we should focus on safety"—there was an immense effort to figure out what happened. Here we have millions dead and the effort to run covid to ground deserves to be correspondingly bigger
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Replying to @Pinboard
investigation obviously has merit! it would be extremely good for everyone to know where the virus originated from. it is also taking place in a *massively politicized* environment in a country undergoing its greatest period of national paranoia for decades.
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer @Pinboard
that has to affect our sense of both the timeline and the likelihood of finding an answer
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
But to your earlier point, we found answers for things like AIDS decades after the fact, in places where there was almost no record-keeping. You can't hand China a veto over this investigation, or decide to wait on it until the political consequences are less ticklish.
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Replying to @Pinboard
ok, what does 'handing China a veto over this investigation' mean? By what means do we conduct the investigation *without* it being subject to the current state of Chinese politics?
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I'm not competent to answer that, since I don't know the investigatory techniques used in a search like this. What I mean by handing China a veto is conditioning whether or not a full investigation happens based on China's willingness to cooperate.
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Replying to @Pinboard
How do we do a full investigation of something that requires extensive on-the-ground research without Chinese cooperation? That's not a choice on our parts. There's no magic button to press.
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