Radioactive Liability: Why the West Did Not Go After China
The Western response to the origins of COVID-19 only looks puzzling if you take official narratives at face value. Once you stop doing that, it becomes almost boringly obvious.
The West did not hesitate to accuse China because it lacked evidence.
It hesitated because accusing China would have forced Western governments to explain their own role in what was happening in Wuhan.
By early 2020, a laboratory accident was not a fringe idea. It was an open possibility discussed quietly by scientists, intelligence agencies, and policy insiders. And yet, instead of pressure, we got silence. Instead of confrontation, we got deflection. Instead of questions, we got bats, wet markets, and a story simple enough to swallow under stress.
This was not about protecting China. It was about protecting a system.
Wuhan was not operating in isolation. The research conducted there sat inside an international network of funding, collaboration, and shared assumptions. Western institutions helped define what was acceptable. Western money helped pay for it. Western scientists helped normalize it. Western regulators helped look the other way when uncertainty was rebranded as progress.
Had the West openly accused China, the next questions would not have stopped at Beijing. They would have come home.
Why was this research funded?
Who approved it?
Who signed off on the safety assumptions?
Who decided the risks were acceptable?
And why were the same institutions now claiming unquestionable authority over every aspect of public life?
Those were not manageable questions in 2020. They were existential ones.
So instead, a different story was pushed. Not proven. Pushed.
A natural spillover. A bat. A market. A freak accident of nature. No villains, no designers, no decision-makers. Just bad luck. A tragedy without authors.
That story did real political work. It framed the pandemic as an external shock rather than a man-made failure embedded in elite systems. It allowed governments to claim emergency powers without admitting responsibility. It allowed scientific institutions to demand obedience without submitting to scrutiny. It allowed moralizing from above without accountability below.
And most importantly, it prevented Western citizens from asking the one question that would have shattered trust overnight:
“How involved were you?”
Because once people start asking that, the entire legitimacy structure collapses. You cannot tell people to trust the system while admitting the system created the disaster. You cannot demand sacrifice while revealing that the risk was designed, funded, and approved by the same class now issuing orders.
This is why the lab-leak question was treated like radioactive material. Not denied outright. Not examined honestly. Just kept at a safe distance.
Add to this a more cynical but very real constraint: dependency. In the early months of the pandemic, Western hospitals depended on Chinese supply chains. Masks, gloves, reagents, pharmaceuticals. Escalating a political fight would not have produced transparency. It would have produced shortages. And those shortages would have killed more people.
So restraint was rebranded as responsibility.
Then there was the precedent problem. If unintended consequences of advanced research could trigger political or legal liability at the level of states, no major power would be safe. The US runs high-containment labs. Europe funds risky research. Everyone accepts uncertainty as long as nothing goes wrong. Turning “nothing went wrong” into a legal fiction is one thing. Admitting that something did go wrong is another.
So accountability was quietly declared off-limits.
What followed was not a cover-up in the cinematic sense. No secret room, no master plan. It was something more banal and more damning: alignment. Every major institution had a reason not to pull the thread. So no one did.
The result was a narrative aggressively simplified for mass consumption. Nature did it. Nobody decided anything. Nobody approved anything. Nobody needs to answer anything.
And anyone who asked too many questions was told they were undermining trust, spreading misinformation, or being irresponsible during a crisis.
That, too, was part of the system protecting itself.
The West did not refrain from accusing China because it feared conflict. It refrained because conflict would have revealed complicity. Not criminal conspiracy, but institutional involvement. Shared assumptions. Shared risks. Shared guilt.
The bat story was not chosen because it was certain. It was chosen because it was safe. Safe for power. Safe for institutions. Safe from questions that could not be answered without burning their own house to the ground.
That is not a conspiracy theory. It is simply what happens when systems designed to manage risk suddenly realize they are exposed by it, and decide that the public can handle sacrifice, but not the truth.