@Cyber Liberty
Cyber, you know I love you. I just cannot agree with the sheep captivity thing. Many millions have died. They are dead forever. I do not see this virus being used to control people. I cannot believe that leaders of countries decided to use this killer disease to keep people home on purpose. Their economy dies when people cannot go to work. No country wants that. Masks are not a big deal - leaders of countries are not intentionally using a mask to dominate a country. Peace to you, my friend.
I disagree. With all due respect, please read your fifth and sixth sentences and resolve that disconnect. (Note, "dead" is the ultimate control, but can also be used to panic the living, at which point a population offered safety is highly controllable.)
Some people found the timing of the virus politically advantageous, and utilized it politically to damage a sitting president by first calling for policy that maximized the body count, and then using the panic that resulted to lessen resistance to policies which devastated the economy, with the full cooperation/coordination of the broadcast and "social" media.
Viable early onset treatments were severely denigrated, banned, even, using flawed studies which applied those treatments in late stages and incompletely. The explanations of the regimen were censored, and this came to be early in the pandemic, when hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been avoided. I can find NO valid reason for the prejudicial behaviour toward treatments, including some ridiculously badly composed studies which obviously either completely ignored the pharmacological strategy or the entire appropriate application of the regimen.
As for the issue of caring, well, who would have encouraged street parties in a developing pandemic, then decreed that recovering patients should be housed in long term care facilities, with the highly predictable result that tens of thousands died, even though other options were available if they cared more about people than politics.
The Chinese really don't give a damn how many 'round eyes' die of the disease, if the effect is to advance China's economic (and thus military) power. Getting Biden elected is a bonus for them, because no effective resistance will be mounted from the US while he holds the reins. They are playing mah jong while everyone else is playing checkers. A few million lives here or there do not matter in their plans, especially if they aren't their own, but even if they are, they are an 'acceptable loss'.
Had that virus not been used thus, and that economy kept going, there would have been no excuse for the election shenanigans pulled in 2020, and no one would ever believe that the current officeholder in the White House could conceivably won election.
The economy was Trump's biggest reelection asset in 2019, with demonstrable benefit for all demographics (except maybe crooked Leftists) and the virus was used to take it down. Getting Trump out of the White House benefits the Chinese.
The one country to benefit economically (and in terms of global power) from the virus is its country of origin: China, whose GDP is growing by multiples of everyone else's, and who enjoys little resistance while other countries are preoccupied with the pandemic and its aftermath.
